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Launch Something and Meet People at Atlanta Startup Weekend 3

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:14:47 +0000

The third year of Atlanta Startup Weekend is less than a week away and begins Friday November 13th and goes through Sunday night. I am definitely biased as I have attended the last two Startup Weekends, but I strongly suggest attending if you are within the Atlanta area. For those unfamiliar with the concept, Startup Weekend is a 54 hour event where people with a variety of backgrounds — from legal to backend development — gather, pitch ideas and then take the selected ideas from whiteboard to working web application or whatever it may be. First timers can get caught up to speed here.

To date there have been well over 100 Startup Weekends across the world. That being said, Atlanta has been among the most successful cities of the bunch. Success defined as Startup Weekends that have had startups that are still under active development and have received some sort of investment: both Skribit and Twitpay fall into this category.

Early Startup Weekend and Skribit press that has been on my fridge for years

Atlanta Startup Weekend 2 was covered on CNN.com last year, with shout-outs to both aforementioned startups. Skribit was also covered in the Atlanta Business Chronicle shortly after the first Atlanta Startup Weekend.

Startup Weekenders having fun and watching clips from a commercial they were filming.

Building Community

Earlier this year TechCrunch brought attention to the work of two German bloggers that went through every Startup Weekend startup/project at the time to see how many were still alive and kicking. They found that only 12 of the 116 startups at the time were still considered active. That is mixed news – for one it goes to show that there’s something in Atlanta if we can consistently push out active startups, and second, that Startup Weekends are more about meeting people and actually being able to build relationships with those people because you shared a weekend working with them. Before my first Startup Weekend, I knew very few people in the Atlanta tech community and that changed it for the better.

Skribit is the earliest Startup Weekend startup that’s still going. (right click open link in new tab to see complete 2200px tall list)

That is all. Hope to see some of you out there. Of course I’m aware this blog has a pretty large reach outside of Atlanta so this and other local events I talk about aren’t relevant to everyone. Thanks for reading anyhow!

More of my posts dealing with Startup Weekend can be found here. Have you ever been to a Startup Weekend? What do you think of the concept?

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Launch Something and Meet People at Atlanta Startup Weekend 3

Review: AT&T 3G MicroCell

Paul Stamatiou — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:17:10 +0000

The saga continues as I go to all lengths to find 5 bars of cell phone reception at home. It first started when I moved into my new apartment. I didn’t think to check my cell reception when first touring the property so I was in shock after I moved in and noticed I had No Service. In the meantime, I signed up with Vonage for a VoIP line, but I hated having two phone numbers. I experimented with the Wi-Ex zBoost cell signal booster and that worked, but there were drawbacks. It only provided a 6 foot radius of signal, the booster would need occasional reboots and had an unsightly cable and device stuck to my window at all times. Arrrgh!

The 3G MicroCell hidden behind my HDTV

Needless to say, when I first heard reports that AT&T was tinkering with femtocells back in January I was ecstatic. I called several high-level people at AT&T to find more about the femtocell and see if I could get in on the beta testing. That didn’t get me anywhere, so I waited my turn. A few weeks ago I received a flyer in the mail. AT&T’s femtocell offering, marketed as the 3G MicroCell, was at an AT&T store near me. At the time of this writing, the AT&T 3G MicroCell is only offered in limited test markets and is only available in North Carolina and parts of Georgia.

Femto-what?

Let me backtrack a bit and describe what a femtocell is and why it makes me happy. In layman’s terms, a femtocell is a small cellular base station designed for home use. A femtocell extends indoor cellular network coverage by connecting to a broadband Internet connection and sending voice/data information through that connection. Give the femtocell power and ethernet, and you receive 5 bars in return; or at least that’s the idea.

While femtocells are not technically VoIP devices, they are similar. Both use your Internet connection to transfer voice (and for the femtocell, data too), neither connects to a real cell tower, and both require that you register your physical address for emergency call (911, etc) purposes. Femtocells do utilize cellular service (not towers though) to connect to the phone, so they can’t be considered full VoIP devices. You might be able to get away with calling them Cell-to-VoIP devices. As you have surmised by now, femtocells are not repeaters or boosters like the Wi-Ex zBoost I reviewed.

Introducing the AT&T 3G MicroCell

As the name implies, the 3G MicroCell supports 3G data in addition to providing coverage for voice. There are two ways of purchasing the MicroCell. You can either pay a one-time price of $150 USD, or you can pay $50 for the MicroCell (via a $100 rebate) if you opt for the $20/month unlimited calling plan add-on, which gives you unlimited calling while your phone is connected to the MicroCell in your home. Also, any calls you start on the MicroCell and then move to the regular AT&T network (ie if you leave your house while on the call) retain the unlimited calling plan’s price, rather than sucking away from your minutes.

I don’t use many minutes on my plan (450 minute plan.. with thousands of roll-over minutes), so I just paid the $150 for the device. The in-store purchasing experience took a little longer than usual. They make you log into the AT&T website (be sure to know your login information) and register the device, as well as fill out and sign a form with your physical address, for E911 purposes. Once you have logged into the website and clicked the “Manage AT&T 3G MicroCell” link, you get a page like this:

The important bit is near the bottom, where you can authorize up to 10 phones/devices to connect to your MicroCell. However, it can only support up to four simultaneous voice/data sessions. I added a friend’s iPhone to the list, as he frequently visits. Surprisingly, he is able to connect to the MicroCell in most of his apartment. He lives 2 floors down and across a courtyard and gets 3 bars of MicroCell service — impressive!

Unboxing & Installation

Unboxing the MicroCell is a rather trivial event. Much like a Wi-Fi access point, you get the device, an ethernet cable and power adapter. However, unlike your Wi-Fi access point, the MicroCell has a stupid setup process. After giving the MicroCell some power and ethernet, it will start blinking the 3G and GPS LEDs. Wait, what.. GPS? Yep. To limit the MicroCell from working outside of test markets (or out of the country too), it must get a GPS lock on your location. AT&T suggests this should take no longer than 90 minutes. It took me about 5 hours.

Unboxing the MicroCell

My apartment gets absolutely no signal of any kind, so why would I be able to get a solid GPS satellite lock? Ridiculous. I called AT&T, as they recommend, after the MicroCell had not begun working after 90 minutes. They took my information down (basic stuff like how I had it setup, how fast my Internet connection was and if I followed the directions) and told me a higher-level technician would call back. The aforementioned technician did call, but only many hours later after the MicroCell began working on its own.

AT&T recommends temporarily placing the MicroCell within a few feet of any windows while it tries to receive a GPS lock during initial setup. After that it does not require a GPS signal. I had to open my window and teeter-totter the MicroCell on the window sill for 5 hours before it started working and lit up the satellite and 3G icons. Then I was able to move the MicroCell to a more permanent location in the middle of my apartment. That required disconnecting the device, which then led to 20 more minutes of the MicroCell booting up before it started working.

The business-end of the MicroCell

Others have reported the installation only taking 30 minutes to achieving GPS lock, so I am very likely an outlier with my horrible GPS signal situation. That being said, you might have noticed the tiny antenna jack on the rear of the MicroCell. That is for people in my situation with poor GPS reception to add an antenna to enhance GPS reception. Unfortunately, AT&T provides no information about where to find such an antenna, leaving all but the tech-savvy in the dust.

Performance

Aside from the troublesome setup, the AT&T 3G MicroCell is excellent. With a centrally-located MicroCell in my 723 square foot loft-style apartment with few walls, I received 5 bars in every room and no degradation of call quality while moving about. I have only tested the MicroCell with at most 2 devices connected, but in my experience call quality is as good as I have ever heard from an iPhone 3GS. The MicroCell does also improve 3G data speeds and I received 1.5Mbps download and 56kpbs upload speeds. Compare that to my typical 3G data speeds for good signal: ~930kbps down and ~50kbps up. Of course, this means little to me as my iPhone automatically connects to my Wi-Fi network at home.

Call quality depends, in part, on the speed of your Internet connection. As long as you have some form of broadband with decent latency (AT&T states minimum bandwidth of 1.5Mbps down and 256Kbps up), I do not believe you will have any issues with at least one phone on your MicroCell. You might, however, want to pause your downloads or any rigorous network activity while you are on a phone call.

In over a week of testing I have not experienced any degradation of call quality, even when I was soaking up tons of my bandwidth (I was downloading via newsgroups at about 11MB/sec). Although during rigorous network usage, a bandwidth test on my iPhone showed download speeds around 400kbps, from 1500kbps. For not as fortunate users that experience call degradation during heavy network usage, there is the option to setup the MicroCell in such a manner that cell traffic is given priority over all other traffic on the network (the MicroCell is connected in front of your router so it goes modem » MicroCell » router).

iPhone speed tests: Regular 3G, MicroCell 3G and Wi-Fi (you can see why I don’t use 3G at home..)

Another factor for MicroCell call quality is device distance to the MicroCell and how many walls are in-between. AT&T optimistically states that the MicroCell “supports both voice and data up to 5000 square feet.” However, I have a hard time believing this is actually achievable in homes that have these things called walls between rooms. If you live in a large multi-story home, you might be happy to hear that it appears you can have multiple MicroCells under the same account, assuming you are more than happy to give AT&T another $150.

Verdict

Go to any iPhone or AT&T forums where people are talking about the MicroCell and you will no doubt find a loud minority of furious AT&T customers. Those users believe, as do I, that AT&T customers should not have to pay extra to receive better cellular coverage to make up for AT&T’s sub-par network. However, my issue is not that AT&T has a bad network (I get 5 bars directly outside my apartment), it’s just that my apartment complex’s unfortunate construction is such that it blocks/reflects many signals. I gladly paid for the MicroCell out of my own wallet, which allowed me to dump my $26/month Vonage VoIP setup and not have to deal with having two phone numbers.

Out with the old Vonage VoIP setup…

AT&T has not gone on the record about a definitive national launch of the 3G MicroCell, rather they are slowly rolling out to new test markets. Seattle and San Antonio are coming next.

The AT&T 3G MicroCell gets 9.5 out of 10 Stammys. Setup was a huge pain, but I can forget about that for the great service and call quality it provides.

9.5 out of 10 Stammys. Funny graphic originally created by Tim Dorr as a joke.

Would you pay up for having 5 bars of AT&T service at home? What do you think about having to pay for cellular network coverage that you shouldn’t have to pay extra for? Currently an AT&T customer?

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Review: AT&T 3G MicroCell

Recap: NoSQL East Conference 2009

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:06:35 +0000

Last week I had the pleasure of attending NoSQL East 2009, a new conference based around the non-relational data stores that I briefly covered in this post. In short, it was a rather intimate and highly technical conference on the grand scheme of things. There were roughly 120 people in attendance for the two-day event that gathered 16 speakers who discussed, more or less, which NoSQL technology they employed at their company and how they used it.

Pre-conference drinks at TAP

Held in the same auditorium as Ignite ATL 2009.

NoSQL East was unlike any other conference I’ve been to in how focused it was. Everyone in attendance seemed to be very well-educated and all in the same field, making for a great group of people to chat with. Jon Moore, Ph.D. Computer Science, put it best in his post covering this conference:

There was a telling moment in the first non-keynote talk where the speaker asked the audience “How many people have read the Dynamo paper?” and easily 95% of the audience put their hands up.

John Willis talking about Big Data

The intent of the conference was, as described by one speaker, to be less deep, technical talks and more of the applications and uses of certain types of NoSQL. However, a few speakers did get a bit technical.

Geir Magnusson of Gilt explains vector clocks used by Voldemort

That being said I rather enjoyed Mike Miller’s talk about CouchDB in particular because he went over several case studies and showed how various companies were using and fitting CouchDB into their architecture.

Mike Miller of Cloudant going through some CouchDB case studies

As for most intriguing NoSQL technologies, I liked Kevin Weil’s presentation on Pig, a new-to-me higher level language version of Hadoop. Why’s that? Because Pig “runs on a cluster computing architecture, on top of which sit several layers of abstraction that ultimately bring the power of parallel computing into the hands of ordinary users.” And to show this off, Weil displayed sample Pig code to run through large datasets — of which the equivalent code in another language would have involved many more lines of code.

Kevin Weil of Twitter showing off Pig (slides)

Silverpop’s MapReduce flow

Overall

NoSQL East 2009 was a great kick-off to what will hopefully be an annual conference devoted to next generation non-relational data stores. As I mentioned in my last NoSQL post, many people have debated about whether NoSQL is an appropriate term. After this conference it was clear that all of the speakers agreed the best solution is to have smaller RDBMSes where necessary and reserve the heavy lifting and Big Data to these so-called NoSQL technologies. Moore suggested something I rather liked; calling it NOSQL for Not Only SQL.

Alright so you’re probably wondering where you can find the intensely technical summaries of this conference. Since I am far from a DBA, I did not attempt summarizing some of the great talks I heard. Instead I’ll point you to Eivind Uggedal, who came all the way from Norway for NoSQL East 2009 and groks this stuff better than myself:

As usual, more pictures can be found on my Flickr account.

For those of you that were at NoSQL East 09, what did you think of it? For those of you at home, does this NoSQL talk interest you? I just wish I had a project to make sure of something like Pig or CouchDB. I’m still using my cozy ORM.

Disclosure: I attended NoSQL East 2009 free-of-charge on behalf of the organizers.

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Recap: NoSQL East Conference 2009

Recap: BlogWorld Expo 2009

Paul Stamatiou — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:58:16 +0000

TechDrawl, an up and coming Atlanta-based blog representing technology, startups and entrepreneurs in the US census South (D.C. to Texas), often helps out local entrepreneurs with things like attending conferences that interest them through holding fundraisers on the site. When I made the rather last minute decision to attend BlogWorld this year (people like Andrew Hyde told me it was a must-attend event), I scrambled to make arrangements. Fortunately, I was approved for a full access media pass (worth some $1200), thanks to the credentials of this blog, but did not have the means at such short notice for providing for airfare and hotel costs.

That’s where TechDrawl swooped in to help out and raised over $850 through the generosity of many entrepreneurs and techies that donated. In addition, TechDrawl’s sponsor AirTran provided me with first class airfare to Las Vegas, where BlogWorld was being held. While the Atlanta area is behind Silicon Valley in terms of venture-funded Internet startup deals and all of that nonsense, Atlanta definitely has a strong tech community that I have had the pleasure of seeing grow in the last 3 years. What other communities band together like this to help out fellow entrepreneurs?

Without further ado, I invite you to check out to the detailed BlogWorld Expo recap I wrote on TechDrawl: The BlogWorld Experience.

Yours truly with celebrity Adam Carolla and Scott Monty, head of Ford’s social media efforts.

Enjoy!

Have you ever been to BlogWorld Expo? How about Vegas? Thoughts?

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Recap: BlogWorld Expo 2009

People: Adam Carolla, Andrew Hyde, Scott Monty

How To: Build a Microsoft Windows 7 and Intel Core i7 PC (Part 1)

Paul Stamatiou — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 05:35:06 +0000

By the time you read this, Microsoft’s latest attempt at making a decent desktop operating system (I kid, I kid), dubbed Windows 7, will have been released worldwide. I took it upon myself (and my debit card) to build a new computer properly suited for Windows 7, as well as some HTPC/gaming goodness, after receiving this Skribit suggestion. I have always been a fan of Small Form Factor computers, dating back to my old Shuttle SB61G2 (Intel P4) and SN85G4 (AMD Athlon 64) computers. When it came time to plan out my next PC build, I decided to stick with SFF and base the system off of the fairly new Shuttle SX58H7 barebones kit.

The basis for this PC build started out as a simple computer for Internet Explorer 6-8 testing for web development so I didn’t have to rely on VMWare Fusion with Windows setup on my MacBook Pro, which I always found rather annoying. Then this project snowballed into building a media powerhouse and Windows 7 tinkering machine.

Why SFF + Shuttle SX58H7?

Well for one, the Shuttle SX58H7 is the only Core i7-supported SFF created by Shuttle, and one of the only such SFFs out right now (the others are just ugly.. I’m looking at you iBuyPower). That being said, I originally looked at building a regular, non-SFF tower computer. After a few hours of searching for good cases, I gave up and went to the sleek Shuttle SFFs I have loved so much in the past.

Shuttle SFFs are sold as barebones kits. They include the case, power supply, motherboard and CPU cooler; you bring the rest.

The freshly unboxed Shuttle SX58H7 (protective wrap still intact) – Shuttle’s first foray into Core i7

Aside from aesthetics, the SX58H7 boasts much of the same features and more or less all of the performance served up by its full-sized bretheren. It sports a 500 Watt PSU, motherboard with Intel X58 chipset, support for up to 16GB of DDR3, and an onboard SATA RAID controller through the ICH10R southbridge. Historically, Shuttle SFF PCs have had heating and noise issues but recent kits have put those issues to rest.

In short: Never trust a computer you can’t lift. (ref)

Why Core i7?

Intel’s Core i7 platform has been in the early adopter stages for quite a while (released November 2008) and is just now ready for mainstream usage with more reasonable prices, and the typical unrivaled performance associated with Intel’s latest and greatest. (The mobile variant of the Core i7 was deemed the fastest laptop processor ever.) Actually, I take that back; Core i7 is not for mainstream, that’s more along the lines of what Core i5 is for.. but I digress.

Core i7 processors are the first to run on the 45nm Nehalem architecture, which includes such goodies as 30% lower power usage for the same performance, an integrated memory controller supporting DDR3 and better hyperthreading performance. The Core i7 processor I went with for this build is the low-end 2.66GHz quad-core Core i7 920 processor, namely because the next processor up had a huge price difference.

In short: Why build a new computer on the now-outdated Core 2 Duo/Quad platform? Start with a low-end Core i7 setup and if you feel the need for speed later on, just get a faster Core i7 processor (or overclock).

Why Windows 7?

The reviews are in and Windows 7 is leaps and bounds better than the 3 year nightmare known as Windows Vista. Reasons for this include much better device driver support (my printer just… worked!), a hugely revamped window manager (Aero) and pleasant performance (Windows 7 will actually run on a netbook without being horribly sluggish).

The number one feature I have come to enjoy with Windows 7? Aero’s hot keys for Aero Snap:

Win+Up Arrow: Maximize the current window
Win+Down Arrow: If the current window is maximized, restore it; if the current window is restored, minimize it
Win+Left Arrow: Dock the current window to the left half of the screen
Win+Right Arrow: Dock the current window to the right half of the screen

It’s not quite like Exposé but it sure does bring a lot of convenience to Windows 7. Oh and Jump Lists. Those are great too. Aero Peek is spiffy as well. So is the new taskbar. And Shake..

I could make this section a whole post, so I’ll stop there. Read David Pogue’s thoughts on Windows 7 in the NY Times for a basic overview of Windows 7, then checkout this post detailing some of the Windows 7 interface.

Pre-orders of Windows 7 at Amazon.co.uk in the first eight hours of its availability surpassed the demand for Windows Vista in its first 17 weeks. It became the highest-grossing pre-order in Amazon’s history, surpassing sales of the previous record holder, the seventh Harry Potter book.
-Wikipedia

In short: None of my computers run any version of Windows right now so I am giving Windows 7 a shot. Windows 7 brings back the excitement I once had in Microsoft products — I used to watch Bill Gates keynotes (I vividly remember watching the stream of Gates at XP’s launch on 10/25/01) like I now do Steve Jobs keynotes.

Parts List

Piano black Shuttle case looks sleek but is an epic fingerprint magnet

Prices as of October 2009

Shuttle XPC SX58H7 $625
LG GGC-H20L Blu-ray drive Discontinued ($169 as of 6/08)
2 x 1TB Samsung F1 RAID class/certified hard drives 2 x $132
6GB (3 x 2GB) OCZ Gold DDR3 $129
Intel Core i7 920 CPU $279 (snagged mine for $199 with some deal at a Micro Center store)
XFX ATi Radeon HD4890 video card $195
Shuttle PN20 Wi-Fi adapter $69 (got it for $50 on Newegg, but it’s now “deactivated” there)
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate $319 for full, $219 for upgrade or free through Microsoft BizSpark

Note: Links above utilize my Amazon Associates tag. If you enjoy this blog and want to share the love, feel free to buy/browse through those links. One of the things I learned at BlogWorld Expo that I just came back from (that’s another post) is that it’s easier to sell a product, rather than get advertising. So I’m giving this affiliate stuff a shot. Otherwise, no hard feelings. I’ll keep blogging.

In short: A good amount of fast RAM, quad-core CPU, ~high-end video card with 1GB GDDR5, and lots of storage. A fine setup to put Windows 7 and any media/gaming tasks I have to the test.

The Build

Computer parts ready for installation

As with most Small Form Factor PCs, the Shuttle SX58H7 has rather cramped internals but the case’s superb design, with a removable drive cage, makes setup fairly easy. I’ll let the pictures do the talking:

Installing the Core i7 920 processor

Yeah I admit it, this post is more about detailing the computer build and the why’s about it rather than a pure how to article. If you have any questions about the specifics of building this, or any, computer drop me a line in the comments or my contact form.

The business end of the Shuttle SX58H7. Dual gigabit LAN is nice to see.

The final, assembled system with the case off

This system is equipped with two 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 hard drives sporting RAID certification. While you can just about RAID any two identical drives, if they are not RAID certified they are more likely to get dropped out of the array when doing error recovery. That is to say that the RAID controller might think the drive is offline/taking too long to respond while it is really just in the middle of some hefty error recovery, and the controller will incorrectly drop it out of the array; thus degrading or failing your RAID array. These RAID certified drives make those issues a thing of the past. (However, I’m not sure how relevant that still is as the ICHR10 RAID controller with the X58 chipset isn’t too shabby either.)

Setting up 2×1TB RAID

Installing Windows 7 Ultimate

The Shuttle nicely tucked away behind a 24-inch display.

While not initially intended to be a replacement for the HTPC I built and wrote about last year, it seems like this new computer has become my primary media PC.

Questions?

There will very likely be a follow-up to this piece, so please let me know what you’d like to see next – suggest on Skribit (and/or comment below). Did you end up waiting in line for the Windows 7 midnight launch? Are you planning on upgrading to Windows 7 for your PC? Thoughts on SFF computers? on Core i7? Price still too high? on Windows 7? I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

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How To: Build a Microsoft Windows 7 and Intel Core i7 PC (Part 1)

GlideTV Introduces Navigator – first “Couch Mouse”

Paul Stamatiou — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:38:05 +0000

So you’ve built a fancy new HTPC, with a custom case that fits perfectly into your home theater setup, but without fail you’re still using a wireless keyboard and mouse created with desktop use in mind. (Or maybe you’re up on your gadget game and have a gyro mouse or use software like Boxee that only needs a remote.) There’s something wrong with that picture and GlideTV has recognized the need for a custom mouse for couch surfers. GlideTV just announced what they are claiming to be the first “couch mouse” and it is dubbed the Navigator.

The GlideTV Navigator is much smaller than it looks. I was hoping it would be movie popcorn bucket sized.

At an MSRP of $149 USD, the Navigator is priced well beyond even upper tier wireless keyboard and mouse combos. However, in the true nature of a compliant HID device, it is supported out of the box by Windows, OS X, PlayStation 3 as well as “any set-top box that supports standard mouse and keyboard HID devices.” Thankfully that also implies Linux boxes as well as I know quite a few people with Linux-based HTPC setups.

The device is essentially a clickable touchpad boasting handy features for couch surfers such as one-thumb scrolling as well as standalone application buttons like Enter, Esc and Back. The Navigator also has backlit buttons for volume and playback functions, which is definitely a must for what I can imagine typical use would be — a dark room. However, some of the more interesting features — integrated search menu and an on-screen keyboard — rely on Windows-only software at the moment.

GlideTV showcased the Navigator at CES 2009 where it won the Best of Innovations Award, so there’s definitely something to be said about this first “couch mouse.” That being said I truly think such a device needs to be larger instead of something prone to getting stuffed under couch cushions or being dropped easily while trying to hold a beer and nachos.

What do you think of the Navigator? Is this something you would be happy to add to your HTPC setup? What keyboard/mouse/remote combo do you have with your current HTPC setup? My current HTPC setup has a cheap tiny wired keyboard that I only use for administrative purposes, with everything else being controlled by a Logitech MX Revolution wireless mouse.

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GlideTV Introduces Navigator – first “Couch Mouse”

What is NoSQL? Enter NoSQL East, conference of non-relational data stores

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:29:47 +0000

There’s a new tech conference coming to Atlanta at the end of the month. Unlike other events I have covered and attended, this one is for those who not only develop websites but also deal with large data sets at high load and have learned the struggles of dealing with relational databases like MySQL at such scale. The underlying concept (movement rather) is called NoSQL — a (much debated) term describing the next generation of data storage technologies.

Yeah, it’s a fairly technical conference and to be honest most NoSQL stuff is probably way over my head. That’s why I’m so intrigued by it. The only conferences that get press around here seem to be B2B-centric or talk about leveraging Twitter to grow your brand — not exactly stuff that whets my intellectual appetite.

NoSQL 101

Alright so you’re a technical person and do some web app work but are not exactly a DBA. What is NoSQL and what are the common applications for it? Well first off, the current limitations of relational databases need to be addressed. A relational database (RDB) like SQL can be most easily described as a table-based data system where there is minimal data duplication and sets of data can be accessed through a series of relational operators like joins and unions. The problem with such relations is that complex operations with large data sets quickly become prohibitively resource intense, although generally the benefits are reaped at the application level where database code need not be convoluted.

There are ways of getting around these limitations, as so well described by Adam Wiggins of Heroku in his aptly-named article SQL Databases Don’t Scale. He talks about the popular tactics of beefing up relational databases for huge applications (vertical scaling, sharding and read slaves) along with listing their downsides.

So why are relational databases just now becoming an annoyance? Eric Florenzano puts it best:

As the web has grown more social, however, more and more it’s the people themselves who have become the publishers. And with that fundamental shift away from read-heavy architectures to read/write and write-heavy architectures, a lot of the way that we think about storing and retrieving data needed to change.

Enter NoSQL: non-relational data stores that “provide for web-scale data storage and retrieval especially in web based applications because it views the data more closely to how web apps view data – a key/value hash in the sky.” NoSQL is meant for the current growing breed of web applications that need to scale effectively. Applications can horizontally scale on clusters of commodity hardware without being subject to intricate sharding techniques.

Of course if you are coming from an RDBMS background, you will preceive a functionality loss when moving to such non-relational key/value stores. I can’t go into much detail here as this is all still new to me. If you’re up for some technical reads:

NoSQL: A Modest Proposal by Chris Williams
NoSQL if only it was that easy by BJ Clark
Notes from a NoSQL Meetup – Yahoo! Developer Network Blog
My Thoughts on NoSQL by Eric Florenzano
Social Media Kills the RDBMS by Bradford Stephens

Slides from a NoSQL meetup

As a clarification, I’m not trying to say that there is a looming war between relational and non-relational databases. There’s nothing stopping people from splitting up data in their web application and using both types of data stores where it makes sense. As Brad Anderson of Cloudant (YC S08) says:

NoSQL is about ‘right tools for the job’ as opposed to anti-relational, or replacing traditional solutions.

Event Details

Alright, now back to the actual conference: NoSQL East 2009 is being held October 28-30, 2009, at the Georgia Tech Research Institute Conference Center in Midtown Atlanta, GA.

And the list of speakers and the subjects they will be talking about:

Arin Sarkissian // Digg talking about Cassandra
Kevin Smith // Hypothetical Labs talking about Redis
Kevin Weil // Twitter talking about Pig
Chris Curtin // Silverpop talking about Cascading
John Hornbeck // Engine Yard talking about MongoDB
Mike Miller // Cloudant talking about CouchDB
Cliff Moon // Microsoft / Powerset talking about Dynomite
Justin Sheehy // Basho talking about Riak
Mark Gunnels // Catamorphic Labs talking about HBase
Tim Anglade // af83 talking about tin
Emil Eifrem // Neo Technology talking about Neo4j
Geir Magnusson // Gilt Groupe talking about Project Voldemort
Yuan Yu // Microsoft Research talking about Dryad/DryadLINQ
John Corwin // Yahoo! talking about Sherpa

You can signup with a promo code that I will be offering here ~~later today~~: PROMO CODE Stammy250. ~~Registration is appears to be closed at the moment but I will update this later today when the organizers figure out how to deal with adding people.~~ I’ll be sure write a recap of the event and share what I learned after the event.

Disclosure: I personally know one of the conference organizers and offered to help him spread the word in the interest of promoting the Atlanta tech scene as well as for admission to the conference.

Have you heard of NoSQL before? What kind of web app/database stuff have you dealt with before?

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What is NoSQL? Enter NoSQL East, conference of non-relational data stores

Recap: WordCamp Birmingham 2009 + Skribit Updates

Paul Stamatiou — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 04:46:57 +0000

This past weekend I drove over to Birmingham, Alabama, for WordCamp Birmingham 2009. This was their second WordCamp and brought out some 180 people — three times larger than their first one last year. This was not my first WordCamp; I attended WordCamp San Francisco 2007. In a nutshell, WordCamp is a weekend event where WordPress users, enthusiasts, developers and other members of the community gather for a series of talks, sessions, Q&A’s and networking. If you have a WordPress question, you’ll find your answer at WordCamp.

Sponsoring #wcbhm09

A few months ago, Jeremy Flint contacted me to tell me about WordCamp Birmingham. A few weeks later, Skribit became a sponsor. The timing was just right as Skribit is now ready to start spreading the word. The Friday night before WordCamp Birmingham we deployed a homepage redesign, among other things, that I, Calvin and Alex have been working on for the last week.

Skribit Homepage Redesign. Now with more pitch and some CSS3.

I handed out some high quality custom cut vinyl digital press StickerGiant.com-created Skribit stickers and talked Skribit to anyone and everyone. WordCamp Birmingham is Skribit’s first ‘marketing’ move. We have not done any formal marketing otherwise. I figured the audience was just right and we decided to sponsor. We also built out a promo code system and created a discount for Pro paid accounts, using the same event hashtag for our promocode and spread it on Twitter a bit.

Recap

Innovation Depot – WordCamp Birmingham Venue for Saturday sessions

The two day event started out at an interesting and rather large venue called Innovation Depot — a technology business incubator in Birmingham. With the exception of keynote-style talks, there were two tracks people could attend. A regular/beginner track and an advanced track. I went to advanced track sessions and heard talks from Dougal Campbell, Jeremy Flint, Sara Cannon and Mitch Canter.

Opening Remarks by Organizer Andre Natta

Dougal (one of the very first WordPress developers) talked about WordPress plugin development and covered the basics like filters, actions, hooks and events. At one point in his presentation he pointed out the WordPress Codex, which I agree is an amazing resource for anyone looking to do anything with WordPress.

Dougal Campbell’s talk “Jumping into WordPress Plugin Programming”

Sara Cannon’s presentation was titled “WordPress and Your Brand” and she discussed finding a theme to fit your needs, designing for your brand as well as a sIFR how to. Personally I’m not the biggest fan of sIFR from a usability standpoint. It worked well when browsers weren’t as robust, but with CSS3 supported by most popular browsers now, we will see a strong alternative in CSS3 @font-face (althought setup is still a little tricky right now).

Sara Cannon talking WordPress and Your Brand

Jeremy Flint had an interesting piece on “Essential SEO and Analytics for WordPress” where he covered things like robots.txt, permalinks and keywords, as well as talking about popular SEO and Analytics plugins.

Jeremy Flint’s session on Essential SEO and Analytics for WordPress

Matt Mullenweg, Founding Developer of WordPress

Matt ran a ‘Town Hall’ style keynote; essentially Q&A and it turned out quite well. People asked about what was going to be in WordPress 2.9, what was going to happen to WordPress MU and so on. I’ll update this post and link to the video if I find it. However, the most interesting thing I learned over the weekend was during this Town Hall where Matt made a random comment about how you can easily add custom taxonomies. That is to say that you can set up your own specific tagging structures. Sure enough after poking around I realized it was truly as easy as Matt said — one line of code.

For example, setting up a taxonomy for People:

register_taxonomy( 'people', 'post', array( 'hierarchical' => false, 'label' => 'People', 'query_var' => true, 'rewrite' => true ) );

More info about custom taxonomies here or check out this popular plugin (Simple Taxonomies) if you don’t want to touch any code.

I also sat in a talk by Mitch Canter about WordPress security which covered basics like not removing the “admin” user (I prefer keeping it but giving it the lowest role – foils spammers into thinking they “got in” – and moving all posts over to your new account), changing the default database prefix, database backup and file permissions. Members of the audience, like myself, brought up things like the Stealth Login plugin to change the wp-login.php/wp-admin paths, using SSL to access the WP-Admin with HTTPS, automated server backups to Amazon S3, and locking down Apache.

Shift Workspace (co-working)

The last day of WordCamp was held at the lovely Shift Workspace. I was most interested with the “Genius Bar” idea they were implementing. Anyone that had a problem or needed help with something could pair up with an expert to get their issues resolved.

As for constructive criticism, there were a few issues with WordCamp Birmingham 2009 that I noticed and heard about from others. First off, someone apparently forgot to bring microphones for presenters, making particular people rather hard to hear. The projector(s) used were low contrast, low brightness, low resolution and tended to wash out many presentation slides/demos. Chairs were not exactly abundant so people had to move them from room to room during the event. The Wi-Fi that was hard to connect to (we were later told that some computer on the network was spreading a virus and using up lots of bandwidth; regardless, a single consumer router can’t support 50+ clients in a room), and there was a general consensus among people I talked to that the advanced track was still rather basic. All that being said, I enjoyed the sessions I sat in on, and talking with other devout WordPressians. It’s all about the community.

Ever been to a WordCamp or other such community-organized CMS event? If you were at WordCamp Birmingham, please leave a comment and let us know what you thought of it!

Speaking of events – I will be at BlogWorld Expo Las Vegas Oct 14th – 18th and will be in San Francisco Oct 21st – 27th. Let me know if you want to meet up.

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Recap: WordCamp Birmingham 2009 + Skribit Updates

People: Andre Natta, Dougal Campbell, Jeremy Flint, Matt Mullenweg, Mitch Canter, Sara Cannon

Review: Supercool School (Online Learning Startup)

Paul Stamatiou — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:10:06 +0000

Two years ago during a trip to San Francisco I met up with entrepreneur Steli Efti. He had previously contacted me and told me a bit about his story. He bought a one-way ticket from Greece to San Francisco with the intent of creating a startup called Supercool School. Steli wanted to change the way people learn. I remember talking with him then and noting how remarkably passionate he was about the idea of giving anyone the ability to teach or attend an online class about any subject. I thought to myself about how this type of passion is what startups are really about.

Stammy and Steli at the now non-existent Virgin Megastore in Union Square

A high school dropout and self-taught entrepreneur himself, Steli believes education should be free and limitless — making the web an ideal platform for this. Supercool School classes will always be free for anyone, including children in third world countries (which explains why he’s a fan of the OLPC). He stated in an interview that Supercool School will "spend 30% of our annual net profit on educational opportunities for children in third world countries." I believe this qualifies as the type of swinging for the fences and world changing that Sarah Lacy had in mind when she wrapped up her TechCrunch 50 coverage:

I did interviews with most of the TechCrunch50 experts backstage and there was a common gripe about the companies launching there: Not enough passion, not enough swinging for the fences, not enough trying to change the world. There were too many people building safe businesses, too many companies just trying to make existing things slightly better, and too many people wanting to be the next Mint.com, not the next Google.

Fast-forward to 2009 and Steli is still crunching away on Supercool School, along with some help. They worked on several iterations, at one point based around a Facebook application, before settling on their current website, which makes use of Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro to host the online classrooms, alongside their own software for the rest of the service. Supercool School is currently in private beta, and I have been tinkering around with their Startup School portion of the site. I became so intrigued with the classes I’ve taken or watched that I had to write about my experience.

Supercool School 101

It all starts with a request. Someone submits an idea for a class and specifies what they would like to learn or teach. The class request is then listed throughout the website, allowing anyone to join. When a request fills up, the site allows someone to come on-board as the teacher of that class. Users can browse classes — scheduled, recorded or requested — on the site.

A Class Request

That teacher can then set a date and time for the class. When class time rolls around, the teacher and students join an online, live interactive classroom of sorts. Anyone can share their audio and video, text chat, use a whiteboard and follow along with presentation slides. However, there’s no need to worry if a few people can’t attend the class; each class is recorded and archived for future playback at anytime by anyone.

The Online Class Experience

I took Supercool School for a test drive last month and attended a “Founders Interview” class, which is a series devoted to interviewing successful startup founders. This particular one was hosted by UserVoice co-founder Marcus Nelson. He talked about everything from the very beginning of the company to some of their marketing and sales tactics. Throughout the entire interview, users asked him questions via chat and audio. All in all, I was pleasantly surprised how relevant much of the information was to me and I started taking notes of my own (PDF), which I then shared with the class via EtherPad.

Supercool School – Startup School: Class Page

While there is a distinct teacher role in Supercool School classes, everyone is essentially treated as an equal and given the opportunity to speak their mind and ask/answer questions as they please. While this could lead to wildly irrelvant classes and unruly behavior, I haven’t seen that from the classes I have attended or watched. People are spending their own time to join the class, so generally everyone brings something to the proverbial table.

Live online class – anyone can share their audio/video and chime in.

The particular class I participated in had a few technical issues. For example the teacher’s microphone continually stopped working and he had to exit and re-enter the classroom and tinker around with settings. Other times the video and audio would be choppy, despite having a solid connection to the site. The classroom’s fit and finish is typical of a generic Adobe-created Flash product and not the sleekest out there, but it gets the job done.

Playing back a pre-recorded class.

One interesting class series is called “Pitch Your Startup” and encourages people to come and share their slides and talk about their projects. Other classes cover topics like iPhone development, using Google Adwords, marketing through Facebook as well as funding strategies. Throughout this blog post I was talking about the Startup School section of Supercool School, thus everything is startup related. I am not sure if there are any other sections live but there will surely be many more sections and curriculum genres up once Supercool School officially launches.

Thoughts

Bringing the classroom online is not a new concept by any means, but everyone that attempts it has their own way of getting the job done. Some such solutions aggregate content by subject matter and open up the site for users to comment on and add to, but this does little to engage users and establish a strong sense of interactivity or community. Supercool School takes the more literal sense of the classroom and brings it online.

Do you think Supercool School’s method of online education works? It might be too early to tell and I’ll have to see what kind of reaction other curriculums receive, but I am definitely a fan.

Supercool School competitors include sites like eduFire that charge money to attend classes, so how will Supercool School survive if everything is free? While Steli hasn’t given any hints as to the business model behind his startup, he said that they will not make money by “selling paid services, products or anything else that doesn’t bring additional value” to all members. That doesn’t seem to leave much room for anything else, so I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Have you ever used any such online education/classroom sites before? Listened to one of those iTunesU podcasts? Can online education work or is there a real need for a physical classroom?

Leave a comment below (with a valid email address) and I’ll try to hook you up with a beta invite if you’re interested.

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Review: Supercool School (Online Learning Startup)

People: Steli Efti

First Impressions: 17-inch Apple MacBook Pro 2009 (Unibody, Anti-Glare)

Paul Stamatiou — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:15:47 +0000

It started out like any typical Friday morning. I snoozed the iPhone alarm about 5 times then got a late start to the morning and did a groggy stumble to the desk to check email before doing anything else. Unfortunately, this time my 11 month old 15-inch MacBook Pro (unibody) kernel panicked a lot, on every boot. It wouldn’t even see the Intel X25-M SSD I had in there although the drive was completely usable in two other computers. After a half-day of debugging I ended up going to the Apple store, doing a “quick drop” at the Genius Bar and buying a new 17-inch MacBook Pro so I could keep working; based on my experience that Apple repair can be slow sometimes and I didn’t want to wait a week or more before getting back to work. The problem ended up being the SSD, which is currently being RMA’d back to Intel to be replaced with the G2 version of the drive, but I digress.

If this were not antiglare you’d be seeing my reflection in the screen right now.

Why 17-inch? Why anti-glare?

So why did I opt for the 17-inch MacBook Pro this time? Well frankly, because I have never owned a 17-inch laptop before. I had the 13-inch original white MacBook, the 13-inch Air, the 15-inch first generation MacBook Pro, the 15-inch unibody MacBook Pro – but never a 17-inch. Aside from that, I wanted to see what it would be like to have a portable 1920×1200 resolution-capable laptop. Yeah it is kind of odd to see someone get a huge laptop so they can be more mobile but here’s my logic: with my 15-inch MacBook Pro I always had to dock it up to my 24-inch Dell LCD so I could get the resolution I’m used to working with and disconnecting it to move was a pain, and dealing with the reduced resolution while not connected to the external display was a definite bummer.

As for why I went with the $50 anti-glare option this time, well I got tired of looking at fingerprint smudges and my reflection with past glossy MacBooks. While glossy displays are better for video watching with slightly more vivid colors and darker blacks, I began to loathe it for daily use. I mean how often do I watch movies on my laptop? I have other computers and TVs for that. Also, have you tried watching a movie with a glossy MacBook on a plane? With all the overhead lights, or sun coming in the side of the plane window, the glossy screen is remarkably annoying.

Thoughts

The screen is brilliant — that is, once you get adjusted to the ridiculously high PPI (pixels per inch). Everything is small on this screen. A 15-inch MacBook Pro with a native resolution of 1440×900 has a PPI of 110. A 24-inch display with 1920×1200 resolution has a PPI of 94. The 17-inch MacBook Pro at 1920×1200 has 133 PPI.

PPI comparison: 17-inch MacBook Pro and 24-inch Dell. Look at the window shared across the displays. 133 vs 94 PPI

The downside of having such a high PPI with a relatively small display is that you can’t comfortably work from the screen from more than a few feet away – even with perfect vision.. everything is just small. That being said, I sold one of my monitors that I would have used to pair to my laptop and now rely solely on the MacBook Pro itself. The 17-inch MacBook Pro’s display is also 8-bit and has “60 percent greater color gamut that delivers desktop-quality color in a notebook.”

This is the MacBook Pro revision without any easily user-accessible parts. Instead of a latch to access the hard drive and battery, you need a screwdriver to remove the back panel. A bit of an inconvenience but it makes room for a (40% larger than previous generations) behemoth 95WHr battery. This lets Apple claim a ridiculous 8 hour battery life with the integrated graphics enabled. This translated to a real world runtime of about 4.5 hours (Wi-Fi + heavy web browsing + half-brightness) in my experience over the few days I have owned the laptop so far.

I’m still playing around with the laptop and will update this post if I have anything to add. Overall, I’m very pleased with it as long as I don’t remind myself that it cost $2,752. Unfortunately yesterday I realized that this laptop does not fit in my Timbuk2 messenger bag. Hrm.

Have you ever owned or used a 17-inch or larger laptop? How did you like it? What are your thoughts on “desktop-replacement” laptops? Where do you stand on the glossy vs anti-glare debate?

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First Impressions: 17-inch Apple MacBook Pro 2009 (Unibody, Anti-Glare)

Review: Brother HL-2170W Wireless Laser Printer

Paul Stamatiou — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 04:18:29 +0000

Two years ago I wrote one of my most popular articles, A Realistic Back to School Guide for College Students (and off-campus edition). In it I talked about how great cheap black and white laser printers were for the college student or pretty much anyone that isn’t printing out color photos (I leave that to Flickr Prints anyways):

Printers are the one item you can technically do without in college and be okay. Most, if not all, universities let you print out at the library, although you are likely on a quota, such as a max of 10 pages may be printed during any one week. If you don’t like making 3am runs to the library to print off a report, then getting a printer is for you. Considering that most of what you print will be PowerPoint handout slides and papers, it is best that you get an affordable black and white laser printer.

For the last 5 years I have been using a now discontinued HP LaserJet 1012 that I found for just $100. Since then I have run 3 or 4 toner cartridges through it, each with a lifetime of about 2,000 pages, so I have definitely put it to good use. However, when it came time to replace another toner cartridge, which sells for about $70 USD from HP (or ~$25 for a generic brand), I decided to see what other laser printers were out there. The HP I have is still in perfect working order but the lack of networking was a bit of a turn-off.

A quick search later and I ended up with the highly-ranked Brother HL-2170W laser printer that I snagged on Amazon for about $120 USD. The HL-2170W’s Wi-Fi and Ethernet support made this an easy decision.

The Brother HL-2170W tucked away in my little closet office, thanks to Wi-Fi.

Setup

Traditionally, getting a regular printer on a network has been a hassle. I remember having to purchase various USB to Ethernet adapters, none of which worked, trying to get an HP multifunction printer on a network. With printers that support networking natively, all you need to know is the printer’s IP address and ensure that you have the printer drivers installed on all client computers — something I learned while spending much time at high school as a “computer guy” working with huge 4000-series HP LaserJets and trying to network them with everything from G3s, G4s and G5s to 166 MHz Windows 95 boxes.

Fortunately with this printer, setup was a breeze and I had 2 computers printing over Wi-Fi in 10 minutes.

With Mac OS X, the printer was immediately detected with Bonjour after I temporarily hooked up an Ethernet cable during setup. After I added the printer and installed the supplied software I was able to provide it with the login credentials for my Wi-Fi network.

Dense apartment complex = tons of Wi-Fi networks

Windows 7 installation was a 2 minute ordeal. No drivers necessary.

You don’t need to install the software to setup the Wi-Fi network though. Just browse over to the printer’s IP address, which you can find by logging into your router and viewing the DHCP clients table, and use the default login of “admin” with password “access”. From there you can configure the wireless network information, and more importantly change the network name of the printer from the default “brw00242b547878″ to something cool like AdmiralAckbar or NeilPatrickHarris.

Brother HL-2170W web interface

Other things you can do in the web interface include setting up an email address for the printer (haven’t tested this out – does it mean it would print anything you email it?), adjust printer settings like toner save as well as print resolution, and check on toner life.

Mac OS X Printer Settings for Brother HL-2170W

Setup was a pleasant surprise and I was up and running in just a few minutes. Afterwards, I moved the printer away from my desk and into my closet. I used to have a shelf under my desk to store my old USB-tethered printer and that was always an annoyance.

Performance

The official specs state that the 2170W boasts a speed of 23 pages per minute. Quite the improvement over my old HP’s claimed 15ppm. So how does it stack up in the real world?

To test this I ran a few print batches. Laser printers require a bit of time to warm up and get going, so that’s why the “first page out” metric is pretty important. I ran four batches with two different types of documents. The first batch was the first 30 pages of Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby – a PDF composed text and images. The next batch was 30 text-only pages of Paul Graham essays. Then I did one batch to see if the “toner save” feature saved time as well as toner. These tests were run entirely over Wi-Fi: both the test computer (Snow Leopard MacBook Pro) and the printer. My router only supports 802.11b/g, so there was no 802.11n magic going on here.

Type: 30 Pages, Text and Images
Resolution: 1200dpi
Printer fires up: 55 seconds
First page out: 1 minute, 9 seconds
30th page out: 4 minutes, 26 seconds
Effective ppm: 6.8 ppm

Type: 30 Pages, Text and Images
Resolution: 600dpi
Printer fires up: 17 seconds
First page out: 26 seconds
30th page out: 1 minutes, 39 seconds
Effective ppm: 18.2 ppm

Type: 30 Pages, Text
Resolution: 1200dpi
Printer fires up: 1 minute, 43 seconds
First page out: 2 minutes, 3 seconds
30th page out: 3 minutes, 17 seconds
Effective ppm: 9.1 ppm

Type: 30 Pages, Text
Resolution: 600dpi
Printer fires up: 17 seconds
First page out: 25 seconds
30th page out: 1 minutes, 39 seconds
Effective ppm: 18.2 ppm

Type: 30 Pages, Text
Resolution: 600dpi with Toner Save
Printer fires up: 13 seconds
First page out: 22 seconds
30th page out: 1 minutes, 37 seconds
Effective ppm: 18.6 ppm

In summary: 1200 dpi is stupid slow and the first minute or so is spent just spooling the printer/sending data to it and you likely won’t be printing photos on a black and white laser printer anyways. 600 dpi is the best all-around setting by far. That being said there is virtually no time difference between 600 dpi prints of any type of content.

Complaints?

I have absolutely no issues with this printer. However, picky people will be easy to notice that this printer likes to curl paper. Laser printers get hot (nothing wrong, that’s just how they work) and when you’re running paper through a hot printer it tends to curl. Apparently the HL-2170W gets a bit too hot and causes the paper to curl up on the sides. I was using 24lb Xerox paper made for laser printers.

A brief explanation of this from HowStuffWorks:

Finally, the printer passes the paper through the fuser, a pair of heated rollers. As the paper passes through these rollers, the loose toner powder melts, fusing with the fibers in the paper. The fuser rolls the paper to the output tray, and you have your finished page. The fuser also heats up the paper itself, of course, which is why pages are always hot when they come out of a laser printer or photocopier.

To combat this issue, there is an option in the software when you go to print called “Reduce Paper Curl.” Below is an example of this feature at work. On the left we have a small stack of paper with that option enabled. To the right is a larger stack of paper, all done without any curl reducing setting.

My curious puppy and her tennis ball in the background.

The result? It kind of works.

Verdict

Setup was ridiculously simple and Wi-Fi support is outstanding. The supplied performance is great for my simple needs (usually typing out letters to mail, the occasional boarding pass printing and printing out of PDFs I want to keep handy for reference). I don’t really care about the paper curl issue, which was the only thing I could find and I looked pretty hard. The only other thing that might be annoying is that it comes with a “starter toner” cartridge, which basically means it is half-full and won’t yield as many pages as the replacement toner you will end up purchasing some amount of pages later.

Which brings me to this Amazon comment:

Brother has programmed the printer such that when its thinks the toner is empty, it stops working. This happened to me when I was printing some important documents. There is a clear plastic circle at each end of the toner cartridge. The printer shines a light through to see how full the toner is. Simply cover one of them with a piece of opaque tape, and the printer will think that the toner is full. I’ve already gotten 1500+ pages out of the starter toner that was “empty” at 983, with no difference in printed quality.

Regardless of these nitpicks, the Brother HL-2170W laser printer gets 10 out of 10 Stammys for remarkable value and ease of use.

Do you own a printer? Have you gone laser yet? How much and what do you print? I am always tempted to check out photo printers but I know I will never print more than a handful of photos and be suckered into buying ink every few months.

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Review: Brother HL-2170W Wireless Laser Printer

Review: Neofab Legion II (”World’s Brightest Single LED Flashlight”)

Paul Stamatiou — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 02:58:06 +0000

Every once in a while I get the chance to check out some different kinds of gadgets – ones that I wouldn’t normally buy on my own. At first it was the $699 USD Wicked Lasers 155mW green laser that can ignite matches, and then I took a look at the $400 AE Light Xenide 20W HID personal searchlight. Today I’ll be taking a look at something a bit more ordinary, a LED flashlight by Neofab called the Legion II. Okay, well maybe it’s not that ordinary. With a rated output of 742 torch lumens, Neofab claims the Legion II is the world’s brightest single LED flashlight.

The Neofab Legion II at full blast in a room with no other lighting.

Details & Setup

The Legion II is a $179 USD flashlight sturdily crafted out of a few pieces of 6061-T6 aluminum with a hard anodized protective coating. Powering it are three 18650-size 3.7V rechargeable lithium ion batteries (batteries and charger not included). This is the first problem with the Legion II. The batteries are hard to find and expensive.

The Legion II and its power source

I ended up going with UltraFire batteries that were 3000mAh — that’s about the highest mAh rating I was able to find for 18650 batteries. Each battery runs about $10 USD and then you’ll need to get a charger. Unfortunately, everywhere I looked I could only find a charger that charges two 18650s at a time. The Legion II needs three, so unless you have two chargers, it will take about 40 (20*2) hours to charge all of the batteries. The higher the mAh battery rating the longer charging takes, and with 3000mAh 18650s, it took about 20 hours to charge two empty ones. (Note: numbers from the 5.5VDC/450mA 18650 charger I have.)

On top of that, charging the batteries requires taking them out each time and putting them in the charger. It would be nice if there was a simple charging jack, similar to the Xenide flashlight, especially since I found putting the batteries in to be a bit of a challenge. The tail cap of the Legion II has a PCB that relies on some small contact patches to touch the bare aluminum inside of the flashlight body. Getting good contact requires a lot of force, at least with my particular Legion II and batteries, so I ended up applying some foil to help with the connection. I think it would be better if there was a piece of copper that came up the inside of the body and made a better attempt at making contact with the tail cap.

Usage

Close-up of the reflector and ~10 Watt LED.

The heart of the Legion II is the powerful CREE XLamp MC-E LED, which paired to the 18650 batteries gives the Legion II a rating of 742 torch lumens. While technically it is a single LED, it’s like having four LEDs in one with a multi-chip design. Neofab claims the Legion II is the world’s brightest single LED flashlight. Before continuing though, it’s important to mention that the 742 lumens rating is torch lumens, compared to emitter lumens. Emitter lumens measures all of the light coming out of the LED in all directions. On the other hand, torch lumens is a more real-world measurement that excludes light that goes out of the back of the reflector, light that doesn’t bounce off and is used to heat up the reflector, light that is used to heat up the front lens and doesn’t pass through, light that bounces back to the emitter and heats it up more, among other things. It has been said that torch lumens can be as low as 2/3 of the emitter lumens. The CREE MC-E LED used in the Legion II has an emitter lumens rating of 90 lumens per Watt, so the real emitter lumens of the Legion II is likely closer to 900 emitter lumens. Overall, I’m just pointing out that the Legion II really is bright and the rating method used for it is realistic, where as you might see some other flashlights say they have 900 lumens when really they are just stating emitter lumens.

10 Watts for a diode is a lot

Using the Legion II is a bit interesting. It is controlled by twisting a spring-loaded ring on the body of the flashlight. The main benefit is that you can have access to every feature of the Legion II using only your thumb. The downside is that it’s not very intuitive. It can temporarily be turned on by moving the ring counter-clockwise, or turned on for constant use by keeping it in that position for a few seconds then letting go. However if the ring accidentally goes back to the middle and moves back to the clockwise starting position, the flashlight turns off. In addition, there are five levels of brightness available by twisting the ring counter-clockwise to go to a lower level or clockwise to go up a level. The lowest setting emits 98 lumens, the second gives out 157, the third 264, the fourth 456 and the full-brightness fifth level outputs 742 torch lumens.

I would have preferred if the control ring had notches and stayed in those positions as you moved it. While I applaud the creation of an innovative control mechanism, I find it a bit buggy in its current implementation. I have to think about using it, which shouldn’t be the case with intuitive controls. For example, if you are on the fourth level of brightness, there’s no way you could tell based on the position of the control ring. If it had the notches like I suggested, it would be easy to tell from a glance.

Control ring instructions from the manual:

Left = TemporaryON , and OFF when you release the ring.
Left + Hold (5 sec+) = Constantly ON. * * You can set the brightness level for this mode separately.

Right = Temporary ON, and OFF when you release the ring.
Right + Hold (1 sec+) = Constantly ON. * * You can set the brightness level for this mode separately.

When the light is constantly ON, you can use these functions:
Right + Hold (1 sec+) = OFF.
Left + Hold (1 sec+) = Battery Gauge.
Right = Brightness Level UP.
Left = Brightness Level Down.
Loosen the tailcap , then the light is OFF,then tighten the tailcap = Save the brightness setting.***
*** You can reach Constantly ON from Left or Right, and the setting will be applied to Left or Right depends on the way you turn on the light.

Performance

I did a run-time test of the Legion II at its brightest setting and it ran for 3 hours and 27 minutes with the 3000mAh batteries I was using. Unlike other flashlights that get dimmer as the batteries drain, the Legion II delivered the same full 742 lumens at all periods during my runtime test. However, when the batteries are done with, the beam shuts off immediately after flickering a few times. That’s why the Legion II has a battery gauge built-in to give you an idea of battery level as you’d have no idea otherwise. Runtime can go as long as 20 hours on the lower settings, but I did not personally test that.

As for how the Legion II can run at full brightness for so long, it does an excellent job at dissipating heat with the integrated heatsink design.

Beam throw is clearly visible compared to the orange glow of the sidewalk light. Photo not manipulated or touched up in any way.

My biggest issue with the Legion II is the lack of a user-focusable reflector setup. While you can purchase additional reflectors and swap them out yourself for different uses, it would be much nicer if you could just twist a ring to adjust the throw and width of the light beam.

Legion II lighting up a sidewalk

Almost looks like a lightsaber..

Video Hands-on

I wanted an excuse to test out VideoPress so I made this video hands-on of the Legion II:

Recorded with a Canon SD990IS that apparently sucks in low light situations. Sorry about that.

Overall

The Neofab Legion II is a strong, well-built flashlight that lives up to its promise of being freakishly bright. However, at $179 USD without including batteries and a charger I began to question its value. I think the price includes research and development — similar to how electric-only cars started out being remarkably expensive (Tesla stated their Roadster price includes their R&D). The Legion II strikes me as an early prototype. I like where it is and surely future versions will be great, but I have a hard time recommending it right now. There’s not even any retail packaging yet and the website doesn’t have

The current implementation of the Legion II, despite its usability issues, does what a flashlight is supposed to do and executes that core competency well. I give the Neofab Legion II 7.5 out of 10 Stammys.

What do you think of the Legion II? Would you shell out $179 + shipping + batteries + charger for it? What would you use it for?

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Review: Neofab Legion II (”World’s Brightest Single LED Flashlight”)

Atlanta Gets Its First Ignite (It Rocked)

Paul Stamatiou — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 22:30:15 +0000

Alright, so you’re pretty down with the tech scene. You’ve gone to more BarCamps than you care to list, have a few WordCamps under your belt, maybe a Startup Weekend or two, and perhaps a SuperHappyDevHouse here and there. Maybe you’ve been to the invite-only Foo Camp if you’re all kinds of special. But have you been to an O’Reilly Ignite event yet? Until this past Thursday, I hadn’t. That’s when Atlanta held its first Ignite and I can say without a doubt that it went off without a hitch. I don’t know what the official count was, but the event had close to 500 RSVPs.

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers.

As the quote from O’Reilly’s site above states, Ignite is all about getting people to come together to share their hobbies, projects, thoughts, whatever, in an interesting 20 slide, 15 second per slide format. There were 18 speakers at this IgniteATL that was held at the Georgia Tech Research Institute in Midtown Atlanta. Organizer Colin Ake convinced me to present something. I was originally going to do a talk on something blog related, but after reading more about Ignite and seeing how it was more about people not talking about their main line of work, I ended up doing a talk entitled “HDR Imaging for n00bs.”

The main room. There was an “overflow” room that had the audio and video as well.

Other talks covered a variety of topics like space, hydrogen, computer overclocking, art, beer, biology and business.

Me yammering on about HDR Imaging.

Below are my slides and a video of my talk (thanks for recording Ivan!). Watch at your own risk..

Hats off to the organizers, Atlanta’s first Ignite night was a blast and I’m eager to see what kind of talks spring up at the next one.

My Ignite presentation. I don’t make for the best speaker, that’s for sure. :-D

Have you been to any such Ignite nights or similar events? What did you think of it? Props to Nathan Fowler for letting me use some of his great pics of IgniteATL. This was the first time I used Keynote to make a presentation and it was a delight. Stammy approved.

Unrelated: I’ll be at WordCamp Birmingham later this month as Skribit is a sponsor.

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Atlanta Gets Its First Ignite (It Rocked)

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How To: Get Started with HDR Photography (Part 3)

Paul Stamatiou — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 22:14:29 +0000

Welcome to the third and likely final part of my series on High Dynamic Range photography. In the first part I covered what HDR imaging actually is and how it works while the second part went over DSLR camera setup for taking shots necessary for the HDR imaging process, in addition to configuring a regular Canon Point-and-Shoot camera for auto-bracketed RAW shooting. If you’ve been following along, you should now have several RAW images to use for HDR imaging. If not, take your camera outside and take some nice shots. I’ll wait right here.

More Shooting Tips

As I said in the Part 2, you need to shoot in Aperture Priority (or Program mode and keep the same Aperture for all auto-bracketed shots) and choose an f stop in the middle so you have some room to experiment. I suggested something like f/8 in that post, but it obviously depends on your camera, lens and subject. Read up on F-number and Depth of Field if you’re not too sure. In general, the F-number corresponds to how wide open the shutter is. The lower the f-number, the wider open the aperture is, the shallower/smaller the Depth of Field and less time and light required for adequate exposure. It’s hard to see the effects of different F-number changes on the screen of your camera while you’re shooting, so just take a bunch of shots at different settings and analyze them at your computer later.

In this article I will be using 3 auto-bracketed shots because that’s the most my Nikon D90 can capture. If your camera can do 5 or more, by all means go ahead and try that. The software processing techniques I show in this article won’t vary too much, if at all, with more photographs. Here’s a handy list of the maximum number photos some cameras support for Auto-Exposure Bracketing. The more shots your camera can take, the lower the EV difference you’ll want between each shot. In the last post, I took some example shots with an EV difference of 1 across 3 shots. I have since started shooting with an EV difference of 2 between shots for a more interesting final HDR image, but that’s all subjective.

Oh and try to shoot something that isn’t moving. Here’s an extreme example of ghosting that will be shown in an HDR image if you are shooting a moving subject. This was created with 3 shots (-2, 0, 2 EV) and processed with Photomatix Pro with the “Attempt to reduce ghosting artifacts” option enabled:

Visible ghosting of cars on Highway 75/85 in Atlanta, GA

As I said above, that’s an extreme example of ghosting. At most, you’re more likely to see a slightly blurry outline of trees moving between shots for example. Instead, you can just take one 0 EV shot in RAW and manually adjust the exposure to create 2 more shots and use those for HDR. Here’s an example of such a pseudo-HDR shot. I didn’t spend too much time on it so it’s not the best looking final product but you get the idea:

A simulated HDR image using the single RAW file at 0 EV on the left. HDR on the right. Look, no more ghosting of the cars on the highway!

What software to use?

Now its down to the actual meat of this entire series — how you can actually take your shots and convert them into an HDR image. But first we have a dilemma. What software should we use?

Panotools.org has the most comprehensive software overview list and comparison chart I have found. I have tested several of these and have only come to like one program, Photomatix Pro, which is available as a standalone Windows and Mac application, and a Photoshop or Aperture plug-in. Unfortunately it is not free and runs a sizeable $99 USD. Before explaining why I like Photomatix Pro, I’ll talk about the basics of what we’ll be doing and mention some other tools that can be used for HDR.

What We’re Doing Here: So you have 3 RAW photos, ready for HDR right? Good. Some pieces of software I mention can’t accept RAW files, so if you run into that, convert them to something like 16-bit TIFF files. Here are the basics, regardless of software:

Generate HDR image by importing the 3 photographs
Run a tone map and adjust settings until you like the way it looks
Export and save!

There’s not much to it in practice, but it can be quite difficult to get the look you’re aiming for depending on what software you use. After testing a handful of applications for HDR processing I’ve found that the free applications are generally either:

much more difficult to use and require users to have an idea about how to work with histograms, sometimes with toning curves, OR
extremely limited in what they can do.

One such application is FDRTools Basic. The interface isn’t anything special and after you add your 3 exposures, you are greeted with some histograms and not much else. Even if you know what you’re doing, it’s difficult to get vivid final HDR images without taking your final image and then tweaking it some more in another application.

Using FDRTools Basic requires a bit of skill.

Then there is GIMP with the exposure-blend script. This one requires a bit more hands-on work and coaxing. After importing the images you have to do things like image alignment manually and work with masks and channels substantially to get the look you’re going for — not something for the first timer this article is targeting.

GIMP with the exposure-blend script

To get a bit nit-picky, exposure blending is not the same thing as HDR, however many in the GIMP community seem to use the terms interchangeably. Also, GIMP is not very popular for HDR imaging for purists due to the fact that it doesn’t support 32-bits per channel which can be seen as a real hindrance when dealing with HDR images.

And now we have a program called qtpfsgui that seems to be the exception to my stance that there are no good free tools for HDR imaging.

Importing files in qtpfsgui

The qtpfsgui-created HDR prior to tone-mapping

The "Fattal" operator tone-map in qtpfsgui

Qtpfsgui can create more dramatic final HDR images and gives you much greater control over the tone-mapping process through its various operators, but there are a few issues. Each time you change a tone-map setting, you must have it render a small preview each time. Other programs like Photomatix do this live.

An example of the Mantiuk operator in qtpfsgui

As for the tone-map operators, each one has its own style so I have found that the best way to get an HDR out of qtpfsgui is by using two tone-maps. Essentially, I would use qtpfsgui to tone-map the same HDR twice, but using a different operator each time, and then I would open them up as layers in Photoshop, with the top one set as an overlay in the blending options, and adjust opacity until I liked the look. Unfortunately this takes a lot of trial and error and messing with different tone-maps to find something that looks good. That being said, qtpfsgui is probably one of the best free HDR tools out there. You still need to do a lot of work but you have more control over the final product without having to get dirty with histograms and levels (although I generally tweak those before I save out of qtpfsgui).

Another free application I wanted to look at was the Windows-only Picturenaut. I would classify Picturenaut as an easy to use free application that is rather limited in what it can do. After importing your exposures through “Generate HDRI”, you have the option of running one of two tone-maps: Adaptive Logarithmic or Photoreceptor Physiology.

Running a Photoreceptor Physiology tone-map in Picturenaut

Unlike qtpfsgui, changes made during the tone-mapping process are live and you can instantly see what’s going on. But that’s where the praises stop. While the final Picturenaut images don’t look as processed and appears more natural, the final images lack the detail and contrast one would expect with a nice HDR tone-map. Moving on..

Before I get to Photomatix Pro I should mention that there is a free version of Photomatix called Photomatix Basic (Windows only).

As the name implies, Photomatix Basic is.. rather basic.

Photomatix Basic is even less impressive than the sub-par Picturenaut, offering just a few tone-mapping settings.

Photomatix Pro

At $99 USD, Photomatix Pro is what I would consider the holy grail of HDR tools. The two tone-mapping settings it has — Details Enhancer and Tone Compressor — cover all the bases of what you would want to do with an HDR image. In particular, I find its smoothing (light, highlights, shadows and micro-smoothing) abilities to be the most important when tweaking an HDR image. It also has powerful image alignment abilities and ghosting artifact removal, however nothing can beat a tripod and shooting a subject that doesn’t move or at least waiting until the wind subsides, if it’s a nature shot.

The best part about Photomatix Pro is that you don’t really need to know what you’re doing. A lot of photographers will argue with me here, but honestly if you are completely new to this all you have to do is move some sliders and see what combination looks best; and with the live preview, this is an easy task.

The Photomatix Pro tone-mapping interface

Each of the Photomatix Pro tone-mapping methods has its own use. Most of the images shown here use the Details Enhancer method.

The Details Enhancer method increases local contrast. This has the effect of boosting shadows and creating a painterly effect. On the other hand, increasing local details makes noise artifacts more visible.

The Tone Compressor method produces a more “photographic” look, and avoids noise and halo artifacts.

Once Photomatix Pro creates the HDR of your 3 exposures and you start tinkering around with one of these tone-mapping methods, there’s not much direction I can give you. Just tweak it until you like what it looks like! After that, save as a 16-bit TIFF and if you’d like, open it up in Photoshop to adjust levels and add an unsharp mask. That’s it!

HDR of my dirty Mustang GT, with the intent of a dark and grungy, not-smoothed style.

Here are a few examples of what Photomatix Pro can create in the right hands. These were done by Eugene Buchko:

Eugene talks about what was involved with this picture here.

HDR done by Tim Dorr

Photomatix Pro can also automatically create a pseudo-HDR image from a single RAW file.

What about Photoshop?

So why haven’t I brought up Photoshop’s Merge to HDR feature yet? Well, because many photographers believe it is not the best tool for HDR image creation. First off, you need to know what you’re doing. There are four main tone-mapping methods with Merge to HDR and all of them are essentially histograms with tone curves you must tinker with.

Tone-mapped HDR images from Photoshop also tend to give a “milky” appearance. However, some photographers prefer Photoshop over Photomatix Pro as Photoshop tends to do a better job aligning images — handy if you don’t end up using a tripod for your auto-bracketed shots. If you’re inclined to give Photoshop a whirl for HDR imaging, here are some handy links:

HDR done in Photoshop by Brooke Novak

Then again, you don’t have to choose. You can let Photoshop do the HDR and image alignment, then save as a Radiance file (.hdr) and let Photomatix Pro do all the tone-mapping.

What’s this green car I keep seeing?

I briefly mentioned it in the first part of this series, but my fascination for HDR imaging came out of a “mission” I did as part of my participation with Ford’s FiestaMovement. Out of some 4,000 applicants, I (along with 99 others) won a 2011 Ford Fiesta (not out yet!) for 6 months.

(not an HDR image)

Each month we have to do a mission and document the process. This particular mission was hooking up with local shutterbugs to create HDR images of the Fiesta, hence Eugene, Tim and Brooke’s HDR images earlier. Here’s the video from that weekend:

The audio gets better.. it was just windy initially.

Wrapping Up

That’s it for my series on getting started with HDR photography. As usual, if you have any suggestions about what my next series should be about, use Skribit on my site or my Skribit blog profile here to give a suggestion or two! This entire series actually came out of a Skribit suggestion.

Oh and right before I was about to publish this I found out about the Hydra HDR application for OS X ($79 USD). Does anyone know how it compares to the rest of the pack?

Let me know how your HDR creations turn out — link me up in the comments! Any questions? If you enjoyed this series, do me a favor and drop me a comment. I blog for comments. ;-)

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How To: Get Started with HDR Photography (Part 3)

How To: Get Started with HDR Photography (Part 2)

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 04:01:10 +0000

This post is part of a series detailing what High Dynamic Range photography (well, there’s no such thing as HDR photography.. take photos first, use HDR process to come up with HDR images, not photos) is, how it works and how you can do it yourself! In the first post I went through the basics and some of the geeky bits about HDR photography: from showing off example HDR images, detailing why HDR images need to be processed and what you’ll need to get started.

This post is part of a series:

The point of Part 2 of the series is to show you how to get your camera setup and get to the point where you have several sequences of photos to experiment with HDR:

3 photographs taken with autobracketing at different exposures. Ready for HDR processing.

In my list of necessary items, I mentioned a tripod which several people said was not entirely necessary. You guys were right. There are ways of taking photos for HDR without a tripod, but they’re much more advanced and generally involve aligning/stitching together the photos, or just using one RAW shot to created a pseudo/simulated HDR image. That’s what the pros do when they need to create an HDR image of a moving subject.

Zachary Jones went into detail about this in a comment:

The technique you’re talking about creates a “simulated” HDR image. Basically, you take the RAW file of a shot and make two more versions of it in the photo editor of your choice. You should adjust one of them to be 1 EV (or maybe 1.5 EV) brighter than the original, and the other to be that same amount darker than the original. Then when you use Photomatix or whatever you choose, you have three photos to use. It doesn’t always turn out a good photo, but the other guy above or below me (wherever this comment shows up) got a really good shot this way.

The next point I wanted to touch on from the last article is whether or not you need a digital SLR camera to successfully carry out the HDR image processing technique. For simplicity sake, I stated in the first article that you did need a DSLR. There are, however, a few exceptions that will allow you to follow along with a Point-and-Shoot camera. Namely, if your P&S or DSLR-like camera:

can save images in RAW
can shoot a bracketed sequence (even better if it can do auto-bracketing)
can use a Canon Hack Development Kit firmware add-on to get the aforementioned features

A camera that can save to RAW, an uncompressed file format comprised solely of raw sensor data, is important for processing as it gives whatever software you end up using access to everything the camera captured, instead of just what it filtered out while converting (demosaicing) to RGB. That is to say that the JPG file format is compressed based on whatever settings your camera has, and does not include the ~12-bit (12-14 if from DSLR, sometimes 10-bit from CHDK P&S cameras) original, unaltered data. While not a must, it can make for better looking final products. With RAW, you have greater control over brightness, contrast, white balance, saturation and colors. Also, if you have access to RAW, you can create a one-shot simulated HDR image as described above; handy for tricky moving shots.

Bracketing is the process by which your camera can take photos sequentially at different exposures. For example, one shot at -2 EV, one at 0 and one at +2. If your camera only has regular/manual bracketing, you will have to be there to push the shutter button for each photo. The biggest problem is that this can end up introducing alignment issues — even with a tripod — from you having to push that button each time. Auto-bracketing (also seen as Auto-Exposure Bracketing) gets rid of this issue by only requiring one button press and taking care of the rest itself. Add-on to that a self-timer and your shots will be lined up almost perfectly. If your camera only has manual bracketing, no worries, most software does a decent job at aligning shots.

Point & Shoot with CHDK Setup

So you’re one of the lucky ones with a Canon Point & Shoot camera lying around, great! Chances are your camera is supported by the CHDK project, allowing you to enable lots of cool features for your camera. I have a 14.7-megapixel Canon PowerShot SD990IS that I have CHDK installed on.

Below are some handy links that go through the details of installing CHDK. In a nutshell: find the appropriate firmware for your camera, format your memory card with a card reader, make the card bootable and install the CHDK firmware. I ended up making two partitions on my 8GB SDHC card and installed CHDK on a small 2MB bootable partition.

A program called Card Tricks makes the CHDK installation easy for Windows users

Once you’ve got it up and running — (and if you run into any issues, leave a comment here and I or some other readers will help you out) — and have tinkered with it a bit, you’ll want do the following (as described in the link above):

In the camera’s menu, go to the Drive Settings page (at least on my 990IS), set the Self-Timer to Custom, the Delay of 0 seconds, and set Shots to however many you want for your bracketed HDR sequence (at least 3).

Canon 990IS – Setting Self-Timer for auto-bracketing

In the CHDK menu (hit ALT then Menu) enter the RAW settings and turn on Save RAW
Also in the CHDK menu, enter the Extra Photo Operations page and scroll down to Bracketing in continuous mode. Adjust the bracketing value to the EV offset you want for each photo in the sequence. You can start with 1. If you have more than 3 photos you can make it smaller, but you can experiment with the results. Before exiting the page, set Bracketing type to +/-.

Note: My particular CHDK version is a beta autobuild and did not appear to let me change between (Tv) Shutter and (Av) Aperture priority exposure. If you have this option, select Av. CHDK also crashed my camera whenever I did auto-bracketing and had Save RAW enabled… your mileage may vary.

Some CHDK menu screens – RAW and bracketing settings

Here’s a quick video where I setup some of these settings and took 5 auto-bracketed shots. Contrary to my own advice I did not have a tripod and set the camera on a table that moved slightly after I hit the shutter button.

Despite the subtle movement between shots, I was able to come up with this HDR image below, comprised of 3 JPGs, just to show you want is possible without RAW and without a tripod. Still looks acceptable to me!

HDR image composed of 3 JPG photos from a CHDK Canon 990IS

Unfortunately, working with RAW files created by CHDK’d cameras requires an extra step. The *.CRW files it creates cannot be opened by any professional image manipulation software. (Note: newer CHDK cameras can save to Adobe’s royalty free DNG format, which can be read by some pieces of software.) Instead, the CRW files must first be converted to DNG using the DNG for PowerShot-2 converter (Mac version here).

Using dng4ps2 to convert a CRW file from CHDK to DNG. You must first go to the dng4ps2 settings and select which camera you’re using. The Mac version of dng4ps2 is currently outdated and does not include newer cameras.

Once in DNG format they can be opened using something like Adobe Photoshop with Camera Raw, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Apple Aperture, or GIMP with the UFRaw add-on.

Using UFRaw to open a DNG file and import to Gimp

That’s a quick run-through of what is involved with taking auto-bracketed photos with a Canon Point & Shoot camera, thanks to CHDK. Now onto the same setup with a big DSLR camera..

DSLR Camera Setup

Comparatively, getting setup for HDR is much easier with a Digital SLR camera. I can’t show how to do this with every camera, so I’ll just go through it with my Nikon D90 and hopefully setting it up on your particular DSLR isn’t too different. The first thing you want to do is put your camera in either P or A mode. Either way, it is very important that you do not change the aperture between pictures. You want to get different exposures at the same f stop, otherwise the depth of field would vary and make for an odd, blurry HDR image. After setting it in Aperture Priority mode, I went into the D90’s Custom Setting Menu, and selected Bracketing/flash.

I then set Auto bracketing set to AE only. I personally like setting Bracketing order to Under/MTR/Over, but it’s not really that important.

Nikon D90 menu – Auto Exposure Bracketing

Nikon D90 menu – Bracketing order

Next, find the bracketing button on your camera. It’s labeled BKT on the D90.

While holding down the BKT button, move the rear jog dial until the top screen shows 3F on the top left. That’s the number of shots it will take. Then, while still holding down the BKT button, rotate the front jog dial to the EV you want between each shot. I’d recommend somewhere between 1 and 2. You can let go of the BKT button now.

Now all we have to do is hold down the button that looks like it has stacked images (above the AF button), and rotate the rear jog dial until the icon changes from “S” to “L”, with a stacked images icon. This is continuous shot mode.

Right now, you can hold down the shutter button and your camera will take 3 shots continuously, each with a different exposure. That’s great, but this can be tied to a timer so you don’t have to be there holding down the shutter button. Head back to the main menu, navigate to Timers/AE lock » Self-timer, set the delay to whatever you like, and the shots to 3 (or whatever you set your camera to do with the BKT stuff above). Finally, go back to the button that looks like it has stacked images, and use the rear jog dial again to select the same L mode, but with the timer icon next to it. Now you only have to tap the shutter once, and let your camera do the rest, undisturbed and most importantly, without introducing any unnecessary vibration.

If you want to get nit-picky, it is generally a good idea to take the White Balance setting off of auto and put it into whatever your particular scene requires. And if your camera isn’t already set to save to RAW files, now would be a good time to set it do to so. That is Shooting Menu » Image Quality » NEF (RAW) on most Nikons.

Take some shots..

The next and final part of this series will deal with taking the 3 (or more) shots at different exposures and creating an HDR image with a variety of software solutions. Until then, take some shots with your newly configured camera! For those shooting with a DSLR in aperture priority mode, the aperture you should set your camera to depends on the exposure and zoom as well as your subject and available light. Set it to a middle aperture like F8 and work from there. It is also recommended to use the lowest ISO setting possible. Higher ISOs introduce noise into the photographs, which will then look worse after the HDR process (HDR techniques generally amplify any present noise).

Feel free to leave a comment if you enjoyed this post. :-) What would you like to see me cover in my next post in this series?

Review: Spotify (Music on Demand)

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 12:32:48 +0000

When it comes to music, I am a complete maniac. I must have some new, non-overplayed songs to get any work done. That’s why I invested in a solid studio monitor setup and that’s why one of my screens usually looks like this:

Left to Right: Hype Machine, SweetFM, thesixtyone, iTunes, Last.fm

Add to that my propensity to store stuff in the proverbial cloud, and it’s no wonder why I’m relying more and more on music websites than actively seeking downloads to put in my iTunes (and it doesn’t help that I always have just a few MB left of space on my early-adopter SSD). I used to labor over uploading my music to Amazon S3 via Bandwagon or backing up to Anywhere.FM to be able to access and sync my music from any computer. Now I’m seeing that is the wrong way to go into the cloud. Users shouldn’t have to do so much work — downloading, uploading, organizing, and constantly updating.

Enter Spotify. (and if you don’t live in the U.S. chances are you already know everything about Spotify.)

Spotify 101

That’s why I have always been intrigued by Spotify. I’ve always thought of it as a cloud-based iTunes of sorts. No need to download songs, yet you still have access to a massive catalog of songs numbering in the millions. Songs are streamed and play instantly, even on the sub-par 4 megabit Comcast cable connection I am currently using while out-of-town. Spotify serves up infrequently played songs themselves, while relying on a custom Peer 2 Peer infrastructure to stream popular songs. Spotify claims they are built using 95% open source technology, which seems to imply that their P2P technology is not too dissimilar from BitTorrent, with a twist. It has been said that they begin by streaming the first parts of a file rather than random parts (as with BitTorrent), enabling speedy playback.

According to Wired, Spotify is “the most successful music sharing platform in Europe with more than five times the usage of its closest competitor.” That’s no small feat either. As for the “catch”, there are three plans: a free ad-supported plan, a paid day pass that gets rid of the ads for a day, and a premium account that ups the audio quality to 320kbps (audiophiles rejoice) and has special “VIP” offerings like access to pre-releases and concert ticket lotteries. The free and day pass plans stream music at 160kbps (better than most online streaming offerings of 128kbps, but not quite near CD quality, commonly defined as upwards of 192kbps).

Once you have your Spotify account, here’s how it works:

Install the Spotify client on your PC or Mac
(sorry *nix-ers, nothing for you just yet)
Browse around, play radio, search for songs and artists, make playlists and play music!
You can share playlists with people, even enable collaborative playlists and get your friends to help you make playlists
If you ever install Spotify on another computer and login, your playlists will all be there.

Coming to America

Whenever an overseas friend told me about Spotify, I’d eagerly load up the website, only to be greeted with a banner saying I wasn’t cool enough to use Spotify.

Unfortunately, due to licensing restrictions we are not yet available in your country. We understand that you are currently in United States (your IP address 127.0.0.1). If you believe we have made a mistake, we apologize and ask that you please contact us at support@spotify.com.

Well, that depressing banner will soon be a thing of the past for US-based music listeners. Spotify is coming stateside soon and I just got my hands on a US beta invite and have been happily playing around with Spotify for a few days.

Will Spotify be able to replace the myriad of online music sites I rely on for my daily music fix? The short answer is undoubtedly yes.

Pretty Screenshots

As usual, you can click the images for a larger version.

Spotify Search View

Spotify Radio View – You can sort by time and genre tags. Artists also have their own radio pages (not shown).

Spotify Home – What’s New

Spotify Home – Top Lists (Tracks and Albums)

Spotify Album View

Some album pages display reviews

Spotify Artist View

Spotify Artist Bio

And then I installed Spotify on my PC… without a hitch all of the playlists I created on the Spotify client on my Mac showed up flawlessly

Spotify PC client Menu – Queues… reminds me of my WinAmp days.

Mark a playlist as collaborative and share the link with friends.. they’ll be able to view and add songs to it.

The best part of Spotify’s streaming nature – you can share playlists, tracks and albums with other Spotify users with just a link

Pros & Cons

Okay so you’ve seen what Spotify looks like and can do. The interface isn’t terribly robust or feature-packed at the moment (version 0.3.18) but it has all the features I regularly use in iTunes, with the huge exception of an equalizer. Poking around in the preferences only reveals the ability to change the cache size, add in Last.fm details and enable volume normalization.

Spotify rocks because of 1) a great music catalog, 2) instant plays, 3) the ability to easily share tracks, albums and playlists with a simple URL, 4) good search functionality and 5) all the music at your fingertips with none of the gigabytes taken up on your hard drive. However, Spotify might scare a few people away due to the you-dont-really-own-songs nature of the service that more or less limits playback to the (online) computer. Spotify plans to combat that issue with iPhone (if approved) and Google Android applications that can cache playlists.

However, the biggest drawback of Spotify in my eyes is how hard it is to find good music. Sure, if you want to know what artist or song you want to listen to then you’re set. And sure, the radio feature and artist radio feature helps solve this issue to a degree. But I still don’t know what I want to listen to. That’s why I’m always browsing the popular lists of Hype Machine and thesixtyone or poking around Pandora. Yes, Spotify does have a featured and top lists area of their homepage but it’s a muddled highlight of songs from their entire catalog, most of which I find overplayed (like a Black Eyed Peas song that was released over 2 months ago, or the epicly overplayed Kids song by MGMT). My suggestion? That they also highlight users’ playlists (with their permission of course) on some area of the application. For example, if you’re on an artist page for 50 Cent, it would show off popular playlists incorporating some of Curtis’s tracks. I’d like to be able to find like-minded music maniacs and link up with them.

Another suggestion: enable the “popularity” column in playlist view.

Would you pay for Spotify?
Yes. I’ve always been a fan of the subscription model and would love to rid myself of worrying about how much space my iTunes collection takes up. Not to mention how cool it is to share a playlist with a friend and not have them ask me where they can download the songs I’m listening to, or be able to Twitter out a link to a new song I like without worrying about the legal repercussions of sharing an mp3 hosted on one of my servers.

But.. but… I like owning my songs!
I will admit that it feels a little weird relying so much on something that could be pulled from under my feet at any moment. I have always been a big proponent of owning my stuff (yeah I know I just said I like subscription models..), which is why I don’t yet use Dropbox, and why I regularly backup my data on services that let me export it (currently trying to write a script that I can cron and will nightly archive my pads on EtherPad and ship off to my S3 account… anyone good with curl?)

But in the end, I think this type of thing is the future. Applications are moving from your computer to the cloud, and surely data is the next thing to do so.

Am I the only person that still burns CDs for my car?
Yeah, I burn CDs to listen to in my non-iPod-enabled car. I did the whole FM modulator thing and hated the quality, and short of getting a new head unit and amplifier, I’m stuck burning CDs. That’s something I can’t do with Spotify as I don’t have access to the files and pigs will have to fly before the music labels let Spotify put in some sort of CD burning ability in their application.

I live in the US. When can I expect to get a Spotify account?
I have no idea (but if their recent funding is any clue.. it’s not too far in the future), nor do I have any beta invites at the moment. Sorry! Leave a comment and if/when I do get any invites I’ll be sure to email them to you.

Verdict

Spotify gets 9.5 out 10 Stammys. I’m just waiting for it to get a bit better and then I’ll gladly ditch my personal music collection (that I will have recreated with playlists in Spotify).

Have you been using Spotify recently? Thoughts? If not, what provides your music these days? What do you think about the whole subscription and streaming music model?

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Review: Spotify (Music on Demand)

Full-time Startup: Skribit Week 30 (Coding, Coding, Coding)

Paul Stamatiou — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:30:51 +0000

It has been quite a while since my last update on what I actually do for a living – work on the startup Skribit. Okay, well to be technically correct this blog is more of a living as it pays more (thanks for reading!), but I work about 60 hours a week on Skribit, more or less. Some weeks we’re gearing up for a deploy (like this past week) and I work a lot more to clean things up in time. For those wondering what Skribit is or what I’ve talked about thus far as I attempt to chronicle my startup journey, here are most of my past articles:

and other such related posts:

My last Skribit update dealt with scaling and at the time we had incessant server issues, sprouting from our move from the nginx web server to Phusion Passenger/Apache. Everything has since been ironed out and we haven’t had to deal with many server configuration related issues. Props to Media Temple for the excellent support with our unique 2-server setup (Disclosure: Media Temple hosts every website I’ve ever touched in the last 4 years).

More or less, everything we have been doing in the last few months has been adding features and improving the service, as to be expected. We have still laid low on the marketing side of things, with no formal marketing pushes and everything thus far being related to word of mouth and me jabbering about Skribit here. We won’t be doing too much active marketing until we believe we have a solid and effective offering. The last thing I want is for someone to try out Skribit, leave and never give us another shot later on based entirely on their first impressions of our then not-built-up offerings. Granted, this can be a bad tactic if you never think you’re good enough, but I believe it’s in our best interest at the moment.

Some of the small features we’ve unleashed in the recent past include suggestion status, tooltips throughout the site that make it easier to browse around, as well as various beautification efforts and the ability to follow users. Lots more about that can be found on the Skribit blog.

Getting Sick… Then Finding Health Insurance

And then June came along and I started feeling sluggish, had a stiff neck, relentless headaches and fever. Days later and I still had the same symptoms. I went to the hospital, where 3.5 hours and $2,800 later I found out I came down with the relatively common mono virus. I was sleeping some 18-20 hours per day for weeks and did not get any Skribit work done for a month, which definitely pushed a few milestones back.

Before I graduated from Georgia Tech, I bought a 1 year health insurance policy through the school so that fortunately should be taking care of the expenses and follow up doctors visits. Through this whole ordeal I learned how important it is to have good health insurance. I was not entirely pleased with how my health insurance performed. It limited which doctors I could see, which in my opinion left some of the better doctors out of the equation. That policy expired this month and I began searching for a new policy in July. There are a lot of options out there and even though there are great sites like eHealthInsurance.com to help filter through all the plans, I was still clueless when it came to different terms like PPO, HMO, HSA and the like.

My father, a practicing doctor for over 40 years, helped me a ton when deciding and told me which providers to avoid based on his experience with dealing with various providers. I also enlisted the invaluable help of Angus McRae, an Atlanta-based insurance broker that works closely with many startups and small companies and has sponsored just about every tech event in Atlanta in recent years. I ended up going with a moderately high-end/good coverage plan from UnitedHealthOne for around $140 per month that has a relatively low $1,000 deductible at the expense of a 20% after deductible coinsurance.

Then I broke my toe with a run-in with an aggressive couch.

This section suggested by Daniel Sims via Skribit

Getting an Intern

In the last month Skribit has been fortunate enough to get some extra help from an intern. Alex Coomans reached out to us a few times on Twitter, asking if he could work with us. After a brief email conversation, I thought he would be a great fit and brought him on-board. He’s a 17 year old high school student and remarkably skilled programmer. This is the first time we’ve had an outsider come into Skribit and get dirty with our code and how we ran things. I was pleasantly surprised that it didn’t take but a day or two for Alex to get a hang of our code. I guess that means we have been keeping our codebase somewhat clean and up to standards.

Alex’s first mission was to construct a way to receive suggestions that aren’t tied to a blog — “unclaimed” suggestions as we call them. The logic behind this is that someone can come to Skribit with the thought that they want to learn more about topic X and don’t care who writes about it. They submit an unclaimed suggestion, which then gets listed around Skribit, for anyone to claim and work on with their own blog. The person that submitted that suggestion can then follow updates of the claimed suggestions and get notified of any blog posts that emerge from it. You can see this feature live on Skribit now.

Alex has also been helping out with getting follower support on Skribit and we’re beginning to integrate that with an upcoming activity stream feature. Overall I’m very glad to have Alex in our ranks, and I’ll be happy to write him a glowing letter of recommendation to Stanford and whatever colleges he ends up applying to.

Hat tip to Michael Ivey (Founder of Twitpay) who originally gave us the idea for this particular Skribit feature.

Spam!

Lately we have been noticing more and more spam and malicious/stupid suggestions coming into Skribit. In particular Colin Devroe, whom I’ve known since my first days of blogging, pointed me to a large number of explicit suggestions on his Skribit account, created by two IPs in his vicinity. While we already have a few precautions in place, such as the ability to report spammy blogs and the ability for Pro account users to moderate suggestions, it was obvious we needed to give the blogger more control over such situations and do things automatically on our end.

When dealing with user-submitted content, you can never be too safe.

As a result we fast-tracked a few related features, with our most recent deploy filtering out suggestions with “unsafe” words, as well as an upcoming feature to ban users/IPs. Both features craftfully coded by Calvin.

Prior to that we had a similar issue with our Groups feature. We axed that feature from a mixture of spam and low user adoption. We’re going to go back to the drawing board on that idea and relaunch something called Topics in a couple of months.

In general though, having to deal with spam is a good problem to have. It means you’re growing and on the right track.

Makeshift Workspace

I’ve been at home in Texas for the past month and will be for the next few weeks, at the request of the parentals. Unfortunately my Herman Miller chair is back in Atlanta. I didn’t think much of it, but just a few weeks into working at home and my back has started becoming a nuissance — all because of the regular chair I have been using here. Just something to think if you work on the computer for 10+ hours a day. This makes me wonder what an upgrade to the Embody would do.

Being at home this long with just my tiny laptop screen, there was no way I was going to be as productive. I made a b-line for the nearest Best Buy and picked up a cheap external LCD. That happened to be the $269 Samsung SyncMaster P2370, a sleek 23-inch 1920×1080 (I would have preferred 1920×1200 though) LCD display. Overall it has been a worthy companion given the situation, except that I’ve noticed some color reproduction issues. Namely it is hard to see light colors unless you’re viewing from extreme angles, which makes Photoshop work rather interesting. While the screen itself is matte, the bezel isn’t and reflects some of the screen inside. The base is rather wobbly too and it doesn’t have any fancy adjustments other than pivoting. 6 out of 10 Stammys.

The Core i7 processor in the corner of this photo is for an upcoming PC build… stay tuned.

What’s Next

The original plan, before I got sick, was to have enough solid features by the end of the summer to begin employing a marketing campaign, talk with some larger bloggers to try out Skribit, et cetera. That has been pushed back a bit, but we’re steadily making progress. Calvin recently rewrote our payment system (from Amazon FPS to the new Amazon Simple Pay) and we have made Pro paid accounts more prominent on the site. All user registrations go through a plans page which shows users what the Pro account can do, for $24.95 per year (we had been doing $5/month).

Right now we’re just building, building, building, then we’ll market while building, building, building, in order to (hopefully) yield solid user traction. From there we’ll see if we need to secure a further investment or how to proceed otherwise.

How’s your startup going? If you’re not working on a startup, what’s your current gig? What are your thoughts on startups (in this economy)?

I’ll leave you with this famous clip (remix):

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Full-time Startup: Skribit Week 30 (Coding, Coding, Coding)

First Impressions: Google Voice

Paul Stamatiou — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 08:59:38 +0000

You have probably heard of a company called GrandCentral a few years ago. They made big news with their September 2006 beta launch of their service allowing people to use a single phone number for all of their phones. David Ulevitch of OpenDNS was the first person I knew that began using GrandCentral full-time. He had a single number that rang his office phone and mobile phone at the same time — a real convenience (of course GrandCentral could do many more things moving into 2007). At the time there were several latent issues with the mechanics of their service. If I sent David a text message, he wouldn’t receive it on the mobile phone he had linked to his account. Add on to that my confusion when he would call me back from a different number than his GrandCentral number, and it was no wonder that GrandCentral was only attempted by the tech-savvy elite.

I am of course talking about the basis of Google’s latest offering: Voice. Google snatched up GrandCentral almost exactly 2 years ago for a rumored $50M USD. Their plan? Turn GrandCentral’s offerings into a seamless experience suitable for anyone. After the acquisition, Google cut-off further GrandCentral user registrations while they transformed GrandCentral into Google Voice. Well the transformation is complete and Google Voice went public (well you still need an invite for the time being) last month.

If you’re completely new to Google Voice, here’s a short video from the Today Show that shows it off. They bring up a downside of Voice as being a privacy issue.. would you trust Google with all your voicemails and phone calls? I think that’s a moot point as most people already trust Google with their email, but I digress.

The Perks

So what does the newfangled Google Voice do that GrandCentral didn’t? Well for one, you can text message a Google Voice number and rest assured that it will be properly forwarded to that person’s mobile phone. When you add phones to Google Voice, it asks if the phone number you’re adding is a mobile device, so it knows where it can and can’t forward texts.

You can send texts directly through the web interface, as well as have it to connect calls.

As the sceenshot below shows, you might receive a lot of “wrong number” calls when you fire up your Google Voice number (in my experience). The same thing happened when I got my home VoIP line from Vonage. The number Google gives you is one they have acquired somehow, and in my two cases, very likely from people that had their number canceled from not paying or just didn’t tell their friends/etc they changed their number for whatever reason.

Wrong numbers have proved to be quite a problem. Fortunately Google Voice has many ways of handling these things.

As such I get a lot of calls from people looking for others, and they can be quite persistent, especially from companies like DirecTV that keep calling trying to get a hold of the previous phone number owner and never leave messages but just call back everyday. Regardless, handling unwanted calls in Google Voice is a breeze. Just like email, you can report a call as spam. The next time they attempt to call, they’ll receive one of those “this line has been disconnected” messages.

General Settings

Call Screening Info

I enabled call screening which requires first-time callers to say their name if they’re not in my contact list, which I loaded in from an OS X Address Book export using a small application called Address Book to CSV Exporter. Furthermore, Google Voice allows me to sort people into groups, each with separate actions associated with them.

Caller Groups Setting

Phones Settings

As for that “Balance” section, it’s for when you connect international calls.. which are ridiculously cheap, especially when connecting to landlines overseas (example: 2 cents per minute to Greece, 22 cents per minute to a mobile phone in Greece).

Google Voice stores all of your SMS converations online, in addition to voicemail messages that you can playback. Voice can also transcribe voicemail messages and then text and email you the voicemail message. I’ve found that especially handy if I can’t take a call (meeting or driving) and a few seconds later I receive a text message with the voicemail’s content. As for the accuracy of the transcription, well that’s up for debate. I’ve heard everything from “total crap” to “pretty good.” In my personal experience, I definitely think it needs some tweaking. I find it very handy though that it picks up phone numbers in voicemail messages and links to them.

Voice’s transcription of a real voicemail of mine.

In the example above, text that is slightly grayed out is where Google Voice wasn’t 100% sure of what was being said and had to guess. Overall though, this particular transcription isn’t terrible and anything it wasn’t sure about is pretty easy to figure out based on context or actually listening to the voicemail.

If voicemail transcription is a big deal to you, check out David Gallagher’s two posts in the NY Times below. He asked his readers to call his Google Voice number leave some creative voicemails. He then posted the audio alongside the Google transcription. He highlighted lots of situations where Google’s transcription tripped up considerably.

Voice can do some other things, such as record conversations (press 4 anytime during a call that you received, unfortunately it makes it obvious to the other party that you are recording.. so no sneaky stuff), but the point of this article is to show you my thoughts on the service and not explain what it does.

Yay or Nay?

First off, why am I so intrigued by Google Voice? I really, really like the idea of having a single number with features that are kind of like a firewall in a sense. I can setup various rules for different groups of people. I can have certain groups go straight to voicemail and hear a particular message (say if I’m on vacation and don’t want any business calls), all the while letting calls from friends and family get right in. Add on to that easy ways to entirely block calls, as well as voicemail transcription, and Google Voice becomes extremely attractive.

Almost better than all of that is the ability to easily add and change phones tied to your Google Voice number. If I want the latest mobile phone, I don’t have to worry about trying to port over my current cell phone number to it. I just add the new phone number to Google Voice and let it handle everything. That’s huge for me so I can try out the latest mobile phone without having to worry about porting over my number (and I can signup as a new customer and take advantage of those subsidized phone prices).

The problem is telling everyone my new Google Voice number. Right now, only a handful of people out of the ~100 regular contacts I keep in my phone are aware of my Google Voice number. However, it has been reported that this will soon change and Google will let you port your current number over to them:

Today you are issued a new phone number when you sign up for Google Voice. But we’ve confirmed that a very small number of people have ported their existing numbers to Google (Google uses Level3 to handle phone numbers). In the U.S. it’s possible to port any phone number to another service provider – even a mobile number to a voip provider like Level3.

TechCrunch: Google Voice’s Secret Weapon – Number Portability

Oh and I can’t forget to mention how convenient it is to be able to access everything from a familiar GMail-like interface online. But don’t worry, you don’t really need to use the web interface after you set everything up.

Of course there are still a few issues that need to be considered. One particular issue from back in the GrandCentral days still exists – if you call someone on your mobile phone, they’ll see that phone’s number instead of your Google Voice number.

Bridging the Gap with Mobile Apps

However, Google has figured out how to solve that issue too. They are deploying mobile applications (currently Android and BlackBerry) that take over the phone’s native dialer. Or at least that’s the idea. The experience isn’t quite the same as just calling a contact from your mobile phone. For example, with the Android application the phone (with the Dial Out setting) first calls Google, then you wait a bit and it automatically begins dialing your contact. There is also the Callback setting that, similar to the web interface, calls your phone and then when you pick up it starts ringing your contact. It’s a different way of doing things but overall a small price to pay to have such a powerful Google Voice number.

I only mentioned mobile applications for Android and BlackBerry. That’s because earlier today Apple (pressured by AT&T) pulled two Google Voice applications from the App Store and declined Google’s own Voice application for the iPhone, citing that it duplicates features already present in the iPhone. If you really want to embrace Google Voice, you’re best moving to an Android-powered phone.

Fortunately I was a GV Mobile application user before it was pulled from the App Store and am able to share some of what the application did:

Some of the features of the GV Mobile iPhone app.. that has since been pulled by Apple/AT&T.

Similar to the Google Voice web interface’s call connect feature, calls initiated through the GV Mobile app lead to you getting a call from your Google Voice number and when you pick it up, the other end will begin ringing.

Expanding Google Voice

I’ve only scratched the surface of Google Voice. There are a lot of ingenious ways to get the most out of it. For example, until mobile applications create a completely seamless Voice experience you can save each person’s unique “406″ number. I’ve linked to a much more detailed article on this at the end of this post, but in a nutshell, you text someone with your Google Voice number via the web interface and assuming you have text forwarding on, you will get their reply on your mobile phone as coming from a 406-XXX-XXXX number that you haven’t seen before. Save that number and text that person back using it, instead of their real number. That way it goes through Google Voice and they see the text message as coming from your Google Voice number. Yeah, it’s kind of hacky but that’s the current state of Google Voice.

Also, fellow Georgia Tech alum James Rintamaki wrote a great guide on how to Use Gizmo5 for free calls with Google Voice and hook up an ATA device to get free calls using a landline phone. If you know of any other such neat Google Voice uses, please share it in a comment.

Verdict

I know this isn’t a full review as I haven’t really put Voice to the test yet, but if I had to rate Google Voice, it would get a respectable 8 out of 10 Stammys from me. The big issue will be creating a seamless calling experience from mobile devices; having to launch another application instead of use native phone functions to call someone is a bit annoying. Apple/AT&T blocking Google Voice applications on the iPhone (Google Voice is a huge threat to carriers) isn’t helping this situation one bit, and it doesn’t seem like I will be getting that experience I’m looking for. If this keeps up, an Android phone will be in my future (HTC Hero?).

Essential Resources

So you just got your Google Voice account and want to jump right in — here are a few must-reads:

Thanks to @Chanathan for pointing me the great resources above, and Jeremy Seger and an anonymous user for their Skribit suggestions that I take a look at Google Voice.

Are you a Google Voice user? If not, why? Are you waiting for better mobile phone integration? If you are a user, how do you like it so far? I for one would love to port my cell phone number over to Google Voice. Or I could buy this number (GV lets you search for numbers and purchase for a one-time fee of $10):

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First Impressions: Google Voice

How To: HDR Photography Basics (Part 1)

Paul Stamatiou — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:08:25 +0000

Thanks to my second Ford Fiesta Movement mission (much more on this later once I get around to reviewing the 2011 Fiesta), I recently jumped head first into HDR photography. HDR, short for High Dynamic Range, is a “set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of luminances between light and dark areas of a scene than normal digital imaging techniques” according to Wikipedia. In short, it involves taking several photographs of the same subject at different exposures, and then using software to combine them for a stunning photograph.

This post is part of a series:

I Still Don’t Know What You’re Talking About

You might not be familiar with the term, but chances are you’ve run across some amazing photographs, especially if you hang around Flickr, that looked a bit.. surreal. Well to be exact, it all depends on how the HDR image is created. Some HDR creations are comprised of many individual photographs to get a better dynamic range and result in a more realistic representation of the subject, while other HDR styles go for a creative and exaggerated look. Here are a few examples of what I’m talking about:

HDR Photo by Robert Himler using 5 exposures (-2,-1, 0, +1, +2) taken with a Nikon D300.

HDR Panorama photo by Maciek Duczynski in Norway taken with a Canon EOS 5D and stitched from 4 vertical HDR photos (3 exposures with a 1.66 EV step).

And now some HDR photographs employing a more artistic than true to life style:

HDR Photo by Rick Austin of the Colony Square area of Midtown Atlanta, Georgia.

HDR Photo of a Corvette by Jason Bouwmeester with a 15mm fisheye lens.

HDR Photo of a Porsche GT3 RS by Geri Amani.

That should give you a pretty good idea of what an HDR photograph can look like. For more examples, you might want to take a look at the HDR group on Flickr.

Where are the 32 bits/channel LCD displays already.. it’s 2009!

Unfortunately for us, all of these HDR images we see on the web and in print have been “compressed.” Not in the sense of file size or quality, but in the sense that most techniques result in a 32 bits/channel HDR photograph, which can’t be displayed properly on 8 bits/channel LCD displays (6 bit if you’re on a recent 13-inch Unibody MacBook Pro! ugh).

Clarification: When talking about color depth in the context of an LCD display, color depth refers to the number of levels each color (channel) can render instead of the summation of the number of colors the screen can render. For example, you likely have an 8 bits/channel LCD display (2^8 levels of Red, 2^8 levels of Green, 2^8 levels of Blue) capable of producing 16.7M unique colors, and you probably work with or view 24 bpp (bit per pixel) images (also 16.7M colors) or 32 bpp images (also 16.7M colors but with an additional 8-bit alpha channel). Anyways, the point I’m getting at is that 8 bits/channel for your LCD display is pretty much the same as 24 bits/channel True Color. Now compare that 8 bits/channel from your LCD display to a 32 bits/channel HDR image. That’s why tone mapping is necessary to properly display all details of the original image on current displays. In other words, your operating system might tell you that you’re running 24-bit graphics now, but I assure you your display is still 8 bits/channel or so.

As such, they must be converted to 8 bits/channel using processes that adjust highlights, shadows, luminance among other things (depending on how it’s done) to fit within the 8-bit range. Before this conversion, the HDR photo can be considered “unprocessed”, much like a film negative or RAW file shot with a DSLR camera — you can’t see all of the captured detail until the RAW file is processed for printing or monitor displaying. I’ll show you how to process an unprocessed HDR photograph with a technique called tone mapping, which displays highlights and shadows contained in the unprocessed HDR image. As a sidenote, HDR imaging uses floating-point numbers instead of integers to allow for what’s called an open-ended brightness scale that can adapt to fit the needs of your particular HDR image. You don’t need to know any of this to make your first HDR image, but it just goes to show a bit of the tech behind HDR.

What You Need

DSLR Camera – I think this one’s a no-brainer. Why does it have to be a DSLR camera? For one, we need to have lots of control over everything – ranging from using RAW files to adjusting exposures with auto-bracketing (sometimes marked as Auto Exposure Bracketing).
Tripod – Okay, this one isn’t completely mandatory, in fact I didn’t use a tripod for any of the test shots I will be sharing with you in the next post(s), but I did stabilize the camera against a sturdy object. HDR imaging involves taking several (usually at least 3) photographs of the exact same subject without any movement of the camera. If you don’t think you can pull that off (especially with cameras that don’t have auto-bracketing that allows photographers to take all 3+ shots continuously), it’s not the end of the world — most HDR imaging software can do some basic image alignment. Oh but how do you create HDR images of moving subjects you ask? That’s a topic for another post.
Computer – Also a no-brainer. It doesn’t really matter whether you have a PC or Mac as great HDR software exists for both operating systems (even some good stuff out there for *nix users too). That being said, I’ll be using my Mac for this series of posts.
HDR Imaging Software – This is where things get a bit tricky. There are lots of free and paid tools that can help you create your HDR masterpieces. I’ll go into much more depth in the next post, but Photomatix Pro is my current favorite. Unfortunately Photomatix Pro is rather expensive, so I will also be sure to talk about free alternative such as FDRTools Basic and Gimp with an HDR plugin.

What’s Next

This introductory post was just to familiarize you with High Dynamic Range imagery if you haven’t delved into it before. The next post or two in this series will go over how to setup auto-bracketing on a DSLR camera in addition to various other settings that are useful when shooting with HDR in mind, as well as creating the actual HDR images with different kinds of HDR imaging software. If you have any questions I can answer in the next post or if I’ve made a mistake in this post (I’ve been up all night..) and you can help clear things up, please leave a comment.

Thanks to the person that suggested this article on my Skribit account!

Have you experimented with HDR imaging before? Do you shoot with a DSLR?

Gogo Inflight Internet: My First Wi-Fi Flight

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 07:39:49 +0000

While inflight Internet access isn’t anything new, especially to airlines like Virgin America and JetBlue, I finally got my first whiff of it this past weekend on an Airtran flight. The particular Boeing 717-200 I flew on this past Friday, like many planes in the Airtran fleet (and some planes with American, Delta, Virgin America, Air Canada and United), was equipped with inflight Internet access provided by Aircell’s Gogo. While I would be happy with any Internet connection while up in the sky, Gogo’s offerings had me rather smitten and provided a comfortable browsing experience.

While boarding the plane, there are a few not-so-subtle clues that this plane isn’t your ordinary people mover.

The Technology

Before I talk about the pricing or performance of Gogo’s inflight Internet access, I figure I’ll mention how it’s done. First off, it’s a high-power EVDO Revison A connection with a theoretical max of 3.6Mbps downstream and 1.8Mbps upstream. But your typical EVDO won’t work in an airplane. Aircell owns its own set of cell towers (92 are in operation throughout North America now) specifically designed for the task at hand, with data transmissions pointed upwards. Each tower operates a roughly 350 mile radius (hopefully your flight path from say Houston to Miami isn’t too far away from the land-based Aircell towers) and can communicate with airplanes flying up to 500 miles per hour. The belly of the plane is equipped with a transceiver and then feeds the data to an onboard system piping everything out to an open Wi-Fi network.

As such, Gogo claims there might be increased latency and potential network drops as the plane moves between cell towers or goes low enough before landing so as to hinder cell tower communication.

The Experience

Depending on the length of your flight, Gogo service costs either $10 or $13 (flights over 3 hours). Getting setup is pretty much as you would expect. Connect to the Wi-Fi network, browse to any website and get redirected to a Gogo portal prompting you to create an account/sign in and pay up.

What you first see when connected to the Gogoinflight Wi-Fi network

Gogo website once connected to their service.

And now for the oh so precious bandwidth numbers:

Gogo Inflight Internet Speed Test… not bad!

Naturally, I was the first to turn on my laptop before I was supposed to and connect to the network so I can say with some confidence that this test was run with only me using the inflight Internet connection. I ran a few other speed tests later in the flight after I assumed others would have signed on as well, especially for my particular flight where many people were given free passes for Gogo service. Subsequent bandwidth tests produced figures around 1.52 Mbps down and 0.28 Mbps up with a slightly higher ping of 150ms.

Bottom line, I was successfully able to carry out a typical Web browsing session without any frustrating delays or other such issues associated with dodgy Internet connections. I had music playing from Hype Machine at times and streaming from iTunes radio other times without issue and was even able to load several YouTube videos. That brings up another point. How is Gogo going to handle bandwidth-crazed users? For one, the plane is equipped with a traffic shaper, so high-bandwidth users are limited unless they are the single one using the service. Second, Gogo ensures that low-bandwidth tasks like simple Web browsing take precedence over higher bandwidth and streaming activities. Also, some may find that their VoIP or video chat service of choice is blocked. That’s also a plane convenience issue in addition to a network hogging issue — imagine if people around you were just chatting away during the whole flight. That could get annoying. And finally, some sites are blocked, presumably both for content reasons and bandwidth issues:

An example of a site blocked by Gogo, using Squid (proxy server and web cache daemon).

However, I was able to fire up a working BitTorrent session, TPB loaded up and I was even able to start a Usenet download, so Gogo is still likely in the midst of changing things. Of course, I was just testing things out and didn’t sustain any obnoxious downloads for any length of time.

Thoughts

Overall I was very happy with my Gogo Inflight Internet experience. I was able to get work done just as if I was anywhere else. Not quite enough bandwidth to have fun but definitely enough to get by. This brings up another question I have had in my mind for a while. Is Wi-Fi on airplanes a good thing? Planes used to be the only place that separated you from the Internet and it was quite relaxing, personally forcing me at least to get some reading done, or focus on a single task at hand without other online distractions so ubiquitous in this wired ADD age.

I think that inflight internet services will only be something for the business person or diehard techie than the casual surfer. A little network prodding (I used nmap) proved this theory on my flight. Halfway through the flight, I was the only person on the network. Speaking of network security, the Gogoinflight wireless network is open and unencrypted, offering no link layer security. An experienced user and a free network protocol analyzer like Wireshark is really all that stands between other Gogo users and their security and privacy. If Gogo just upped the Wi-Fi network to WPA2 this problem wouldn’t exist.

Verdict Right Now: 5.5 out of 10 Stammys
Verdict If Gogo Addresses Security Concerns: 9.0 out of 10 Stammys

What do you think — is Wi-Fi on flights a great thing or another burden? Have you used Wi-Fi on any flights before? What was your experience like?

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Gogo Inflight Internet: My First Wi-Fi Flight

Turning 23

Paul Stamatiou — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:00:53 +0000

Not much to say today other than I’m now 23 years of age! Posting around here has been a little slow and will continue to be for a while. I caught some virus and have had fever for the last week and according to the ER doctor at the hospital, it’ll be ~~another week or two~~ 4-6 weeks before I get my energy back. In the meantime, I’ll be playing Flight Control in bed with my shiny new iPhone 3GS.

I’ve got a lot of good post ideas in the pipeline, including a simple HDR photo how to. As always, you can suggest things for me to blog about on my Skribit profile. We just rolled out some big Skribit updates last week with more on the way. I also recently created a frequently updated Stuff I Use page to keep track of applications, services and hardware I regularly use. TextExpander and Fever were the most recent additions (both recommended). Any other apps or services I should check out?

As always, thanks for reading and subscribing to PSTAM this year!

Related: Turning 20, 21, 22

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Turning 23

WordPress How To: Change Your Blog’s Permalinks

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:16:41 +0000

I recently did the unthinkable. I changed the URL structure of my blog’s URLs. Long considered a scary territory, along with moving domains, due to the SEO implications and potential for losing traffic, I was convinced by Bruce Keener to give it a shot. Ever since my blog launched I have been using the domain/year/month/day/post-name URL structure. I thought it was quite handy to know when the post was written before even loading it, but I ended up dealing with very long URLs that got quite annoying. In addition, it is known that if a random visitor from a search engine knows that the post they are loading is old, they are more likely to close the page quickly (to the point that some webmasters remove the date from posts entirely, or move them to the end of the post). Add to that how Google’s own SEO expert Matt Cutts recently switched to the Thesis theme (which I’m using as well) and his permalinks do not include dates either.

The icing on the cake was Bruce Keener’s comprehensive Case Study In Changing URL Structure where he stated that after the switch he did not notice any drop in his traffic, a result of Google PageRank immediately following the 301 redirects.

I had no loss of search traffic and loss of position in the SERPs for any of the URLs that I monitored during this time.

Going Dateless

That was enough for me to give it a whirl. I switched my URL structure to simply paulstamatiou.com/post-name structure as of last week.

Here are the quick steps that did it for me:

1) While this doesn’t have to be the first step, it’s important to clear your cache so changes are immediate once you do them and you don’t have links using the old structure lying around. I disabled WP Super Cache while I was working, and then cleared the entire cache.

WP Super Cache plugin – disable cache, empty cache.

2) Change WordPress permalink settings. Select Custom Structure and type in /%postname%. It’s up to you if you want a trailing slash. Click Save Changes. Your .htaccess might not not automatically update, but that’s fine, we have to add some stuff to the .htaccess anyway.

3) Open up your FTP program of choice or fire up an SSH session. Navigate to the .htaccess file at the root of your blog’s directory and add in the following line

RedirectMatch permanent ^/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{2}/([a-z0-9\-/]+) http://paulstamatiou.com/$1

after the RewriteEngine On line. Replace my domain with yours. Below you’ll see what your completed root .htaccess file might look like (for simplicity I took out my other .htaccess and WP Super Cache lines):


Options +MultiViews
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

RedirectMatch permanent ^/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{2}/([a-z0-9\-/]+) http://paulstamatiou.com/$1

RewriteBase /
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

NOTE: This RedirectMatch line assumes you have been using the domain/year/month/day/post-name structure. If you have been using some other form, it will need to be tweaked accordingly.

4) Save the .htaccess file and re-enable your cache.
5) If you’re not already using the Google XML Sitemaps Generator WordPress plugin, now is a great time to start. Have it generate a new sitemap for your blog.

6) Add your blog to Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure that the sitemap was accepted and keep an eye on crawl errors periodically.

That’s it! Two weeks later my web traffic hasn’t changed negatively and I’ll wait a bit longer and report back about how everything works out in the long-run. Overall, the latest versions of WordPress (well it goes back to version 2.3 I believe) are pretty robust when it comes to their built-in redirection engine that can redirect all non-canonical URLs to the single canonical URL for the site. Combine this with a tried and true, SEO-tweaked theme like Thesis and your blog should be good to go.

What URL/permalink structure are you using? Have you been a Google Webmaster Tools user for a while?

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WordPress How To: Change Your Blog’s Permalinks

CLEAR Launches 4G WiMAX in Atlanta

Paul Stamatiou — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:22:06 +0000

If you live in Atlanta, you’ll be happy to hear that there’s a new ISP in town. And I’m not talking about just any type of Internet connection. I’m talking about WiMAX (read my Thoughts on WiMAX post). It’s called CLEAR by Clearwire and its launch makes Atlanta the “Fastest Unwired City in the South”. That’s a pretty hefty claim that I’ll have to put to the test later. CLEAR isn’t the first WiMAX provider in the United States – Sprint launched WiMAX under their XOHM brand name in Baltimore last October, and other providers have been helping businesses with WiMAX coverage in major cities as well. But for Atlantans, CLEAR is the currently the only consumer choice when it comes to WiMAX, and considering that providers like Verizon have much slower 3G data plans with 5GB monthly download caps that cost about the same, CLEAR is starting to look pretty good.

Clearwire’s new CLEAR logo

Yesterday’s launch event was far from a little booth at the mall. They pulled out all the stops and took over the Atlantic Station shopping center in midtown Atlanta. There were lots of CLEAR demos being given as well as promotional information for visitors to take home.

Atlantic Station CLEAR Launch Event

The Product

Unlike many of its competitors, CLEAR claims to be different, forgoing lengthy and expensive service contracts for mobile and residential plans that can be purchased by the month or by the day (a day pass will run you $10, provided you already have the hardware). However, despite that fluff if you signup for a two-year service agreement you get “additional savings”, as well as if you get both a mobile and residential plan.

Most people will opt for the $50/month unlimited mobile Internet plan, which incurs a $35 activation fee for those not wishing to get roped into a two-year agreement (I’m looking at you AT&T, no way I’m paying $599 for an iPhone 3GS). I don’t think it would be wise to get CLEAR’s residential WiMAX for your home at this time (only 6 Mbps down), when other non-wireless providers can provide much, much faster connections for the same price.

USB Motorola WiMAX modem dongle

So what’s the difference between mobile and residential plans? For one, there’s different hardware and different performance. When you’re on the go, you only have two options – the hideous USB dongle (I would have preferred some smaller ExpressCard solutions), or using a new laptop with an Intel embedded WiMAX chipset. CLEAR’s USB Motorola WiMAX modem costs $59 and they claim a typical download throughput of 4 Mbps (and 0.5 Mbps up) with that. Residential customers can opt for a book-sized WiMAX modem for $79 that is capable of a typical download throughput of 6 Mbps.

If anything, I’d be most interested in their Verizon MiFi competitor — the CLEAR Spot ($139). Hook it up to the USB dongle and you’ve got an instant mobile Wi-Fi network for your laptop and 7 other Wi-Fi enabled devices (all sharing the 4 Mbps connection).

The Performance

For example, some of today’s 3G wireless networks typically deliver download speeds of between 1.0 and 1.7 Mbps. CLEAR customers, however, can expect to see download speeds of 4 to 6 Mbps with bursts exceeding 15 Mbps, far surpassing even the peak theoretical speeds of 7.2 Mbps in upcoming 3G upgrades. In Atlanta, the CLEAR network utilizes an area-wide WiMAX radio system from Motorola.

- Clearwire

The first thing I did on their demo computers was get out of their kiosk mode Opera browser so I could run a bandwidth test. I navigated to speedtest.net, my go-to site when it comes to carrying out reliable bandwidth tests. It was on this site that I discovered something a bit odd, the CLEAR WiMAX connection was originating somewhere in Seattle. To clarify, it seems like all data for CLEAR users must hop along all the way from Seattle before coming to Atlanta. Can you say latency? (Disclosure: These were all just observations noted in a brief 2 minute test, YMMV. I didn’t get to run any tracerts, et cetera.)

CLEAR 4G WiMAX Speedtests – Mobile modem (left) and Home modem (right)

Interestingly enough, Seattle is where Sprint has their XOHM WiMAX network. Sprint Nextel and Clearwire are in cahoots and working together on this whole WiMAX thing. So if you see a Sprint WiMAX offering in Atlanta later on, the service might not be so different than CLEAR’s.

That being said, I decided to simulate the speeds one could expect interacting with locally-hosted sites/services and performed several speed tests with speedtest.net’s Atlanta-based test server, the same server that my home Internet connection can access just fine. For a laptop equipped with the mobile CLEAR service, I received 1.01 Mbps down and 410 Kbps up, compared to the 2.68 Mbps down and 900 Kbps up bandwidth for the residential CLEAR modem equipped laptop. Long story short, I can’t definitively say anything about CLEAR’s WiMAX service without a more thorough review, as their could be various lurking variables with the test setup I had at my disposal. I was expecting better service though.

I’ve been trying to get my hands on CLEAR hardware and service for a review for weeks now, but they are only testing it for PC users. Oh did I mention that their software for the mobile USB WiMAX dongle is only supported by Windows at the moment? I told their representatives that I could make it work (be it via the CLEAR Spot Wi-Fi access point, or playing around with VMware on my Mac), but they insisted that I “won’t experience the true speed of WiMAX” through Wi-Fi. Last I checked a 4 Mbps connection can’t even max out 802.11b, let alone 802.11g. That’s a task for a fiber Internet connection.

For those needing a WiMAX refresher

Clearwire plans to expand its 4G network across other major metropolitan areas throughout the United States, with Baltimore and Portland already sporting CLEAR service. Las Vegas, Chicago, Charlotte, Dallas, Honolulu, Philadelphia and Seattle will get CLEAR later in 2009 while New York, Houston, San Francisco, Boston and Washington, D.C. residents will have to wait until 2010.

CLEAR WiMAX. cool buzzword? Yes. Neat logo? Check. Great for the perpetually-on-the-move coffee shop co-working types? Yup. Anything else? Pending further review. In other news, I dislike reviewing services whose names are in all caps; it feels like I’m just yelling each time I mention the company.

Does your city have a WiMAX service provider yet? What do you think about CLEAR? Are you currently a user of any for-your-laptop 3G/4G data services?

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CLEAR Launches 4G WiMAX in Atlanta

Review: Wi-Ex zBoost zPersonal Cell Signal Booster

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:15:13 +0000

Not too long ago I mentioned how I moved to a new apartment but was very disappointed to learn that I now live in an AT&T dead zone. A bit of testing has proved that I do not live in an AT&T dead zone (5 bars on the sidewalk outside), but the building’s stucco and concrete with rebar construction dampens reception considerably, to the point where I get no service closer to the middle of the building and just 1, maybe 2, bars next to the window. I did a bit of Google and Twitter querying and found a local Atlanta company called Wi-Ex that manufactures a set of cell phone signal boosters.

Before: This is what I typically see on my iPhone 3G.

After: 4-5 reception bars within ~6 feet of the zPersonal’s boosting antenna.

After a bit of prodding around their product line-up, I decided on their $169 USD zBoost zPersonal YX300 cell phone signal booster (although it can be found for $59 USD on Amazon at the moment). Most of their other products rely on an antenna mounted outside your building or in your attic, which I can’t do due to living in a leased property.

The Wi-Ex zBoost zPersonal YX300 packaging claims a lot, but does it perform?

How it works

The premise behind cell phone signal boosters, the zPersonal included, is pretty simple. There are two antennas. One goes nearest the area of the room where there is some cell phone signal reception. That signal gets processed and amplified through the powered unit and gets pumped out the other end, which you place close to where you need reception. Both antennas are used for receiving and transmitting, with the one mounted where there is reception being the actual end point talking to cell phone towers. It’s important to understand that such a device cannot just make a signal. It has to use at least a weak signal to boost.

This particular zPersonal YX300 is a dual-band unit that receives and amplifies the 800MHz and 1900MHz bands and is compatible with all U.S. carriers regardless of technologies (GSM, GPRS, CDMA, TDMA, AMPS, EDGE, EVDO, HSDPA, 1xRTT) except iDEN (ex: Boost Mobile, Nextel, and Sprint’s Direct Connect) and 1700MHz AWS (T-Mobile US 3G). That means it works with my GSM iPhone 3G.

Installation

Depending on your room layout, setting up the zPersonal YX300 should be a painless process. The zPersonal is made for a single user at a personal workspace and as such has a small range of 6 feet (radius from the antenna). I chose to install it near my desk. The first step is finding a place on your window where you get the best signal and mounting the main unit there. Contrary to popular belief, the plugged in unit goes on the window while the external antenna goes near the workspace.

The Wi-Ex zBoost zPersonal YX300 unit and booster antenna

After I spent a while moving my phone across the window like a stud finder and found the optimal reception zone (2 bars), I mounted the YX300 base unit… only to have it fall down on its own minutes later. This happened a few times until I cleaned both surfaces and dampened the suction cups. I suggest the next version of the zBoost use one large suction cup like automotive GPS devices.

The Wi-Ex zBoost zPersonal YX300 unit and booster antenna installed.

The last steps of the installation process involve placing the external antenna somewhere near your workspace and connecting the base unit to a power outlet. I chose to place the antenna on my desk.

Wi-Ex recommends that the antenna be placed at least 10 feet away from the base unit to avoid interference. This might prove to be an issue for people with smaller work areas. I received the depressing blinking red LED a few times, which means that the antenna needs to be placed further away from the base unit.

5 bars baby!

Experiences

Once installated and powered up, the YX300 should display a green light that means everything is okay and it’s idle. When you’re on a call the light will flash to indicate it is handling the call. If it turns solid green while you’re on a call, you need to be closer to the antenna for it to continue processing the call. That being said, it works. There were a few times I experienced where my iPhone, when idle, will revert back to low signal but when I unlock it and start doing stuff it goes right back up to 5 bars.

When I first started using the zPersonal I had many frustrating experiences where the base unit would show the green light and I would get a good signal, but then 10 minutes later it would start flashing red. I would power cycle it and it would show a green light again, and then show the same flashing red light. After this happened a few times, I experimented with the location of both the antenna and base unit. I haven’t had any issues since then. Location is everything with this cell phone signal booster.

As Wi-Ex states, the zBoost zPersonal is meant for workspaces and provides a “personal cell zone.” I found this to be accurate, and sometimes a little bit of an underestimation. I get 3 bars in the kitchen about 15 feet away when I used to get 1 bar. The bedroom which is another 15 feet past the kitchen still gets “No Service” but I didn’t expect the zPersonal to help me out there.

Concerns

My biggest concern with using a cell phone signal booster in my everyday work environment is whether or not being next to it can be detrimental to my health over time. We all know cell phones emit radiation of their own, so one might be led to believe that a cell phone signal booster might produce even more radiation and not be regulated by the same FCC SAR radiation limits. In other words, I don’t want to nuke my brain.

I did a quick search of the YX300’s FCC ID (SO4YX300-PCS-CEL) and found an RF Exposure Certification Test Report:

If I wanted to nitpick, I could say that the EPA power density equation is for isotropic antennas which technically can’t exist for a number of reasons (good read) (and for which they use decibels relative to isotropic radiator), but I digress.

So you’re probably thinking that this is no biggie because you work next to about 25 Wi-Fi networks. Take for example my Linksys WRT54G2 wireless router. It has a “typical” transmitted power output of 18dBm, compared to the peak of ~20dBm of the YX300; pretty similar numbers. The difference is that the YX300 zPersonal is meant to be next to your workspace and transmits more power, where as my router is several feet away. That being said, this is only something to be slightly concerned about if you’re on the phone a lot. If not, the idle power transmission and various cell phone tower handshakes won’t come near the YX300’s peak output.

In short, don’t put your head within ~8 inches of the YX300’s antenna when you’re on a phone call.

Verdict

After a proper installation, which takes some tinkering, the Wi-Ex zBoost zPersonal YX300 successfully turned my 1-2 bar cell phone signal reception into a 5 bar, 6-foot reception zone around my desk. Call quality was as if I had a normal 5 bar signal. While having a device with wires hanging off my window and running a 10+ foot cable to another antenna can be rather unsightly, I will do anything for 5 bars.

At a regular price of $169 for the dual-band version of the YX300, this signal booster is not cheap. If you are suffering from poor reception inside your building and can find the YX300 for cheaper, I’d definitely recommend it. The YX300 gets 8.5 out of 10 Stammys.

How’s your reception at home? Who is your carrier? Could you benefit from a cell phone signal booster like the zBoost zPersonal YX300?

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Review: Wi-Ex zBoost zPersonal Cell Signal Booster

Review: 2009 Lincoln MKS with Microsoft SYNC

Paul Stamatiou — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 06:54:42 +0000

Those of you that have been following me online for the past few years might know that I maintain a healthy interest in cars in ~~addiction~~ addition to my tech obsession. It wasn’t too long ago that I was in Detroit attending the North American Intl Auto Show, and it was just a year ago that I was on a roadtrip through New York to Washington, D.C. following 17 college teams that re-engineered SUVs to be more sustainable (I even got to drive a fuel cell powered SUV). I could go on and mention how I was at the SCCA Nationals last weekend at Road Atlanta or talk about my involvement with the Fiesta Movement, but I think you get the point. I’m a car nut. So when Lincoln called me and wanted to see if I would review their 2009 Lincoln MKS luxury sedan, I couldn’t say no.

Disclosure: While I was provided this car on behalf of Lincoln as a loaner for 5 days, I was not told to present the MKS in any biased, false light. Everything you’re about read is coming straight from the Paul you’ve been reading for 4 years.

Note: As usual, click on any of the pictures to load a high-resolution version. Photos taken on top of the Georgia Tech Hotel & Conference Center parking deck in Midtown Atlanta with a Nikon D90 and a crappy tripod. Screen pictures cropped using the Photoshop CS4 perspective crop feature I now love.

MKS 101

The MKS is Lincoln’s mid-level luxury sedan, poised just below their flagship Town Car. Lincoln has been facing some steep competition in recent years and they have recently launched a new marketing campaign. I’ve been hearing endless MKS commercials on the local hip-hop radio stations recently. The MKS is at the core of this campaign, with their focus on pumping out new features to attract a broader crowd. Buick did something similar a few years ago with their Tiger Woods campaign, trying to breath new life into the staggering brand.

That being said, the 2009 MKS is now competitive with other entry/mid-level luxury sedan offerings. This review aims to show why.

Price as Tested

The loaner I was given had a standard vehicle price of $39,105 but that number grew to $45,570 with the included Ultimate Package and delivery. Here were a few of the interesting features included in this car:

Microsoft SYNC with integrated navigation system
Dual Panel Moonroof
THX-II Certified Audio with 5.1
“Intelligent Access” with push button start
Adaptive HID Headlamps (headlights turn as you turn)
Air-conditioned front seats

While not included in my particular MKS, adaptive cruise control is an available high-tech option.

The MKS competes with the likes of the Lexus GS, Cadillac CTS, Acura RL, Infiniti M and Volvo S80. While not in the price range of the Audi A8, it is roughly the same size.

Exterior

For a car that is supposed to breathe new life into the Lincoln brand and bridge the mid-sized luxury sedan gap in their line-up, the MKS is aesthetically at a great start. The rear of the car was an instant hit with me. Why? It looks almost exactly like the rear of a last-generation Maserati Quattroporte. Coincidence? Maybe.

On the other hand the chromed-out front grill and chrome window trim is a lesson in gaudy that takes some getting used to. Big 19-inch (optional 20’s) wheels help fill in the wheel wells and give the MKS a good overall road presence. The tires don’t exactly produce the popular low profile look but I think Lincoln made the right choice here as anything thinner would have definitely made a negative effect on ride quality.

Unfortunately there’s not much to see behind the wheels other than small, ugly brakes. The 2009 MKS is equipped with mediocre 12.25-inch front rotors with 2-piston calipers and 12.75-inch rear rotors with single piston calipers. Considering that the MKS only performed “ok” in various brake tests, it could use larger 4-piston front brakes. Lincoln should take a note from Acura – their competing RL has black 4-piston calipers adorned with the Acura logo.

I first heard about adaptive headlights in 2004 when they were the big feature in the Lexus RX330 (debuted in the LS430 first though) and featured a commercial with a guy driving around a winding road to see a deer in the road that he couldn’t have seen if his headlights didn’t turn with the car’s steering. Needless to say, I don’t live out in the country but adaptive headlights in the MKS are a joy to drive around with. The feeling is a bit creepy at first but a pleasant addition to the MKS. The quick video below shows off how they work, and as you can see the headlights turn considerably (realistically about 15 degrees) even given minimal steering input at parking lot speeds. It might need to be scaled back a bit.

Combined with automatic highbeams, I can say that the MKS is a breeze to drive safely at night. As the name implies, automatic high beams is a feature on the MKS that automatically flips on the HID high beams when the car does not detect any other sources of light on the road. When it detected other cars and/or street lights, the high beams turned off.

Angled tail-lights, a beveled license plate holder and not so subtle chrome trim screams Maserati styling.

Performance

Unfortunately the 2009 Lincoln MKS does not feature the powerful 355 BHP EcoBoost V6 engine with direct injection and twin turbochargers that is purported to get 17 mpg city, 24 mpg highway. That engine will debut in the 2010 Lincoln MKS. The 2009 MKS I tested came with a 3.7-liter V6 engine (churning out 273 bhp at 6,250 rpm and 270 lb-ft of torque at 4,250rpm) mated to a 6 speed automatic transmission and an all-wheel drive system. As for the engine’s sound at full-throttle, well it wasn’t exactly music to my ears. It sounded more like a hair dryer. My first thoughts were that this is a subpar powerplant for a car of this size, price and weight. After driving it around town for a few days, I still believe that it needs more power. The fact that the 2009 MKS doesn’t even have a V8 option is shocking when compared to similarly priced, competing luxury sedans. Hopefully the powerplant in the 2010 MKS will put this engine issue to rest.

The MKS sports an all-aluminum Ford Duratec 3.7-liter 24-valve DOHC V6 engine.

With a curb weight exceeding 4,200 pounds, this AWD MKS is roughly on par with the weight of Lexus GS and AWD-equipped Volvo S80 offerings. Combined with the underpowered engine and sluggish automatic transmission, the MKS did not do much impressing in the performance category. The transmission is laggy to upshift while downshifts are jerky. While the all-wheel drive system did a decent job of fighting understeer (oh and there’s lots of it with the big MKS) and helping pull the car through turns, it was also plagued with torque steer under moderate to full-throttle acceleration, requiring the driver to keep steering in line.

Considering that the MKS is heavy (a typical AWD system adds 200+ lbs) and has a high center of gravity as it sits fairly high — 19-inch wheels (P255/45R19) and a tall suspension setup will do that — there’s no surprise that the MKS is also a mediocre performer when it comes to the twisties. The MKS handling reminds me a bit of when I first drove a similarly-sized Chrysler 300C. I overestimated the 300C’s abilities while running through a high-speed curve and oversteer took over and gave me some squealing tires.

Fuel economy is a bit on the low side, as one might expect with a heavy car with an automatic transmission, all-wheel drive system and underpowered Duratec 37 engine that must struggle to get that mammoth moving (that you can find rebadged in the Mazda 6 and CX-9). The MKS received an EPA fuel economy estimate of 16 MPG city and 23 MPG highway but after 5 days of city driving I got around 10.1 MPG with spirited driving and 14.8 MPG with me trying to drive like a normal person. The MKS has a sizeable 20 gallon fuel tank with ‘Easy Fuel’, which Ford describes as a “capless fuel filler that uses an integrated spring-loaded flapper door to eliminate the need for a fuel tank screw cap, saving time and keeping hands cleaner at the pump”. The 2011 Ford Fiesta I am also testing has a similar capless fuel filler feature.

0-60 MPH in 7.5 seconds (7.4 with ~1600 RPM power braking)
0-100 MPH in 19.9 seconds
1/4-mile in 15.5 seconds @ 90.0 MPH

While I did not have the means to measure brake distances, there was noticeable room for improvement with the MKS. As mentioned earlier the MKS has 12.75-inch front rotors with 2-piston calipers. My 2002 Mustang GT had a similar brake setup, which I found so under-performing (on a car that weighed almost 1,000 pounds less at that) that I eventually upgraded to a 4-piston Brembo GT setup that I’m now happy with. But I digress, I would just really like to see 4-piston calipers on the MKS.

MKS ride quality is far from cloud-like but definitely acceptable for its price range, if a little firm. Ride quality felt very similar to that of the current-generation BMW 545i and M5 (in P400/non-M mode).

Interior

Moving inside the MKS I can see where Lincoln tried to garner itself some brownie points. Seats are made from “Bridge of Weir” leather from Scotland and are perforated. This allows heating or cooling to come through, and on hot days in Atlanta, the air-conditioned seats felt amazing. The front seats have 12-way adjustments including variable lumbar support where you can not only vary the lumbar pressure but also its vertical placement. One small complaint is that the seats did little to “hug” me and I felt like I slid around them while carving corners. It could really benefit from adjustable side bolsters found in other luxury sedans.

At highway speeds, the MKS cabin is eerily quiet thanks to copious amounts of well-placed insulation. Unfortunately, my praises end there.

The first thing I look at when entering a car is the gauge cluster, and the one in the MKS is disappointing. The needles are too fat, the typography says “I’m old and busted” instead of the “new hotness” message that I’m sure Lincoln is going for, and the chrome trim doesn’t help. For an example of well-designed gauge clusters, Lincoln should look at anything recent by Lexus. Even their entry-level luxury sedans have excellent gauges, with their last generation IS sedans sporting terrific chronometric gauges.

The MKS comes equipped with an intelligent access system with push button start. That’s a fancy way of saying you just need to have the key in your pocket to open the door and turn the car on; a feature becoming more and more common on all vehicles, not just luxury cars. Unfortunately, the implementation in the MKS requires a clunky, horribly-styled keyfob. It does not have pocket presence. Lincoln needs to take a step back and look at the keyfobs that BMW, Mercedes and Acura are selling with their sedans, because they don’t look this cheap.

Plastic yuck.

Other complaints with the interior include a small trunk opening, small compartments throughout the car (you’d think a huge car would have a huge center console and glove box.. nope) and generally sloppy fit and finish (for example, some of the gaps between panels were uneven) throughout. Also, the front cupholders are almost unusable. They cannot be individually adjusted and make it near impossible to use both at the same time. Adjustable cupholder technology has been present in minivans since the 90’s, I’d surely expect it to make its way to a luxury sedan such as the MKS by now. I should give Lincoln some props though; the top dash cover is nicely stitched and not plastic looking as I’ve come to expect with domestic cars.

The dual panel moon roof in the MKS is definitely noteworthy. While the back section can’t actually open, it still provides a beautiful view of the sky for your rear passengers.

All nitpicking aside, the MKS is a big car with loads of space. The word “boat” comes to mind. In this case, that’s a great thing. Loading up the car with 5 adults was trivial and no one had any complaints about cramped leg room or a low ceiling.

Microsoft SYNC

Once turned on, the beautiful center display toting the THX certified audio system logo greets you.

Here we go, now this car is getting interesting. It’s called SYNC by Microsoft and it’s coming in more and more Ford vehicles. Even Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer drives a SYNC-equipped Ford car (2010 Fusion Hybrid) when he’s not whipping around Redmond guzzling gas in his Range Rover.

In a nutshell SYNC ties together all the tech tasks one might need to do in a car — everything from navigation functions to phone and music — into one seamless system that can be voice controlled. Technically-speaking, the SYNC system is powered by an ARM 11 processor with 256MB of RAM, 2GB of flash memory (which the MKS in particular might have ditched for its hard drive) and Microsoft Auto OS version 4.0.

But SYNC isn’t the only thing about the MKS that makes its technology so powerful. Hidden away under the skin of the car there are 16 speakers, including a 10-inch subwoofer, all powered by a 12 channel amplifiers for a total output of 600 Watts. But it’s not all brute force with the MKS sound system – everything is tied into a digital signal processor within the amplifiers that keeps things from getting out of control. The result? A THX II certified car audio system that supports 5.1 surround sound and sounds amazing (unless you’ve heard a Bang & Olufsen system in a recent Aston Martin or Audi Q7 or A8/S8).

Want to know why the MKS has a stellar sound system? It was designed by THX themselves.

The THX II Certified Audio systems all feature the THX Configurable Speaker Array (CSA) and THX Slot Speaker technologies located in the center of the vehicle dashboard. The THX CSA is comprised of several small, powerful speakers, and uses dedicated amplifiers and THX digital signal processing (DSP) to widen the sound image before precisely distributing it throughout the car’s interior.

Almost invisible to the eye, the THX CSA and THX Slot Speaker allow for better control and directivity of the sound image, delivering a spacious sound stage throughout the vehicle cabin. The result? Music on CDs and MP3 files feel natural, like you are listening to the live performance or recording session.

Source: THX

The SYNC system can be controlled by the MKS’s touch screen, buttons on the center console or via voice controls activated by a button on the steering wheel.

The image above shows some of the available voice commands. While I’m not a terribly big fan of anything voice controlled (I remain scarred from my foray into crappy voice-recognition/dictation software in the late 90’s), the SYNC voice control implementation is pretty accurate but I can never get myself to use it when a simple tap or two in half the time would do the same. The biggest annoyance I found with SYNC voice controls is that most commands have a confirmation screen, requiring you to say (or tap) yes or no. That screams Microsoft innovation right there.

The navigation features of the MKS prove equally impressive, with the exception of one huge annoyance: you can’t add a destination or change anything relating to your route until you come to a stop (technically less than 3 mph I believe). I know that is supposed to be a safety feature, but what if you have a passenger in the car handling that stuff for you? Since maps are stored on the integrated hard drive, route calculation is speedy and maps have sufficient detail. When you are nearing your destination, the screen splits vertically to display a close-up map of your exit and final turns. That is quite handy. Also, when the system speaks to you it cuts out other audio sources from using the front speakers so you can hear what it is saying.

GPS updates are fairly responsive so you don’t have to keep waiting for the map to update before you start guessing if you need to take a left or right at the next intersection. However, one feature I have come to love in my Dash Express GPS unit is missing in the MKS system. I’m of course referring to the Internet connectivity that allows the Dash Express to communicate with Yahoo! Local Search and let you search for any business, restaurant or whatever, and get basic information about the destination, such as store hours.

While the MKS has basic points of interest stored on the hard drive, there’s not much you can do without an address. That’s where Lincoln decided it would be a good idea to add some extra functionality by integrating SIRIUS Travel Link. One of the coolest features about the Dash Express was that it could find fuel prices for gas stations near you. The MKS can do the same thing with Travel Link, in addition to accessing traffic and weather data. Sadly, my particular MKS did not have an active SIRIUS subscription (runs about $7/month) so I could not tinker with any of the Travel Link features.

Once you pair your phone with the SYNC system over bluetooth, it downloads your phone’s address book and allows you to use voice commands to call people by name. The handsfree phone integration and call quality is flawless on both ends and I did not find the need to speak louder than usual for the person on the other end to hear me well. As a bonus, if you have a supported phone (my iPhone 3G wasn’t) SYNC can read your text messages aloud to you as they arrive. It also has 15 common text messages (such as “Why?”, “Too funny”, “Can’t wait to see you” and of course “I’m stuck in traffic”) stored into the system so you can quickly reply to your texts, as long as you are going “less than 3 mph (4.82 km/h)”.

Another SYNC-specific phone feature: if you’re walking to your car and you’re already on the phone, you can tap a button on the steering wheel to move the conversation to the car’s system. Not that I’m on the phone for more than 5 minutes a day but I’m sure there are some people out there that enjoy talking on the phone where this feature would come in handy.

Also, SYNC can automatically call 911 (technically not present in my particular MKS, but available through a software update) with a pre-recorded message after an accident severe enough to trigger an air bag. I have not been able to find too much more information on this feature so I’m wondering if it shares the vehicle’s GPS location with emergency services. It’s trying to provide capabilities found with GM OnStar, BMW Assist and Lexus Link services, each of which have their own call centers on the other end instead of going directly through 911.

Last but not least – the audio features of the MKS. There’s the simple radio screen that pulls together station info via RDS. Nothing special here, no HD radio support (although Lincoln has mentioned that it is coming as a factory-installed option in 2009…) or anything of that ilk.

The radio screen with station display and various options.

Oh but what’s this.. a jukebox? Yup, the MKS SYNC system gives the driver access to 10GB of storage. You can actually rip CDs to the car (or transfer them from your mobile device) and it adds the proper CD track information with its integrated CDDB/Gracenote database. But if you’re reading my blog right now that’s probably not as interesting as just playing music off of your mobile phone or MP3 player.

If your phone supports stereo (A2DP) bluetooth, you’re good to go (iPhone doesn’t unless you have OS 3.0, so you’ll need an adapter) and can play music in high quality over the THX sound system. Otherwise you can use the USB port or aux line-in jack. When playing over USB or bluetooth, SYNC also displays the proper track information. Regardless, the point is that wherever you store your music on the go, you can rest assured that the SYNC-equipped Lincoln MKS can play it.

If I may nitpick once again, I was quite disappointed with the audio visualizer. There were absolutely not style settings – just on and off. I would have loved to have it display some interesting visualizations. Also, for a THX-designed system it is shockingly devoid of advanced equalizer settings. It just has bass and treble sliders. For a person like myself that can end up spending 20 minutes at a time fine-tuning an equalizer preset in iTunes, the MKS left me a bit miffed.

Wrapping up, the THX system sounds fantastic once you feed it a proper digital signal. The center speaker ties everything together. Treble is crisp and clear, while bass remains powerful. However, I did notice that the system in general was too bassy even at lower levels and at anything near upper levels the trunk starts rattling, similar to the improperly insulated trunk subwoofer installs you might see rattling around your neighborhood.

Verdict

There are a lot of things I really don’t like about this car, especially as a person that values performance over everything. However, the clean Microsoft SYNC integration is a strong redeeming factor with the 2009 Lincoln MKS. The interface isn’t as polished as it could be, but it does everything as promised. If only they could invent a touch screen that wasn’t a fingerprint magnet.

While the SYNC system is generally only a $395 option on other Ford vehicles, with the MKS it is part of the larger navigation package that will run you close to $3,000 USD.

Comfort: 8.5/10
Technology: 9.0/10 (leaves room for really cool BMW Night Vision/Mercedes Night View Assist)
Aesthetics: 7.0/10
Performance: 5.5/10
Value: 8.0/10

Hopefully the 2010 MKS and it’s powerful 355 horsepower EcoBoost engine will put the ball back in Lincoln’s court. Until then, I would have a hard time recommending the MKS to too many people. I suggest Lincoln start by redesigning their keyfob because I wasn’t getting any looks from girls at Starbucks as I was playing with my keychain while waiting for my latte… (of note are the Land Rover, Bentley and Mercedes keyfobs).

Thoughts? What do you think of Microsoft SYNC? and the MKS? Can you see someone in your family driving one?

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Review: 2009 Lincoln MKS with Microsoft SYNC

Photoshop Quickie: Perspective Crop

Paul Stamatiou — Thu, 28 May 2009 04:22:09 +0000

I take a lot of pictures for reviews on this blog, most with a Nikon D90 DSLR camera. A good chunk of my time on larger reviews is actually spent reviewing hundreds of images, then fine-tuning the best ones in Photoshop (case in point, my upcoming car review is taking forever). I’ve been using some version of Photoshop since the Mac OS 8 days. However, I mainly used it for the same basic image manipulation techniques — cutting people out of backgrounds while I was on my high school’s yearbook staff, and lots of cropping, levels tweaks and some basic filter work for this blog.

Whenever a new version of Photoshop comes out, I generally upgrade fairly soon (well, when I had my student discount), tinkered with some of the new features and then went back to my old workflow. I would not consider myself terribly proficient with Photoshop. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised (and shocked that I didn’t notice this sooner) when I recently discovered the perspective crop option.

Perspective Crop, Huh?

Perspective crop is like a regular crop, except that when done properly it can readjust the perspective of an image to look as if the picture was taken head on, if that’s the look you are going for.

I’ll let the pictures do the talking. Below we have the before and after of the dashboard of a 2009 Lincoln MKS for an upcoming review. Let’s ignore how I was even able to take such a bad photo in the first place, and move on to the after picture, with the perspective crop successfully (for the most part, I didn’t measure) executed.

Before:

After:

Yes, my iPhone gets abused.

Prior to my discovery of perspective crop in Photoshop, I did the best I could with rotating the crop but that still leaves the perspective untouched. Typical symptoms were that bottom of the object I was cropping was nicely horizontal but the top remained skewed due to the perspective of the shot.

Perspective Cropping is Easy

Step 1: Select the crop tool and begin doing a crop like you usually would, rotating your crop boundary as necessary.

Step 2: Click on the Perspective box in the options bar.

Step 3: Drag each crop boundary corner around individually! Hit enter and you’re done!

Overall

I realize this post might not be relevant to everyone, but when I learned about this yesterday it was a definitely a wow moment that I thought I should share. I wish I had known about this a long time ago! Thanks to my Twitter followers that answered my question and pointed me to the perspective option.

What simple Photoshop tricks do you use on a daily basis?

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Photoshop Quickie: Perspective Crop

PSTAM Update: Moving, DirecPath ISP Still Rocks

Paul Stamatiou — Tue, 19 May 2009 06:26:18 +0000

Things will be a bit slow around here until I find my bearings again. I just moved to another apartment this past weekend. There were a few reasons for moving, from wanting to find cheaper rent with upcoming expenses (which is also why you’ll see me experimenting with different ads on this blog) like paying for my own health insurance and starting to pay student loans, as well as wanting to live in a pet-friendly place so I can adopt a big dog/running companion (currently looking at labrador mixes).

I found a nice loft-style apartment that had the same amazing fiber ISP I’ve had for the last year. I’m happy to report that the pipe is just as fat as my old place. If you ever find yourself apartment hunting in midtown Atlanta and DirecPath/PurDigital/Biltmore Communications is listed as one of the available ISPs, you better seal the deal. They’re the best ISP I have ever dealt with. When was the last time you paid for a service rated at 10 megabits and got over 70 megabits download speed and 45 megabits upload speed? I’m never going back to Comcast.

Holy Bandwidth Batman!!

That being said, with a static IP the service runs about $70 a month. Somehow I only paid $22/month for the same service at my old apartment; I believe it was subsidized by the building community.

As for the move, I was concerned with how I was going to move (and not break) my 50-inch plasma HDTV. I was especially worried as plasmas are notoriously prone to cracking with even subtle flexing, much more so than LCDs. I hired professional movers that touted themselves as being good at moving large televisions. Well, I didn’t have this in mind…

Despite that shoddy padding, the HDTV survived the massive 5 block trek.

With the new place I also decided a desk upgrade was in order. I went to Ikea and got the largest desk I could find. A 63″ by 47″ Galant desk was just the ticket. The most important aspect of this desk is that it’s deep and I don’t have to be so close to the monitor. I originally sold my old 30-inch Dell LCD because my desk wasn’t deep enough to comfortably use it. I’ve been using a 24-inch since then, but we’ll see if a 30-inch is in my future again.

Living Room/Office area

Unfortunately, I now live in a dead zone. I’ll see how much of an issue this is over the coming weeks and then decide from there if I need to research cell phone repeaters/boosters. It could stem from a variety of issues from building construction, AT&T network coverage or just weak iPhone 3G reception. Either way, it’s very frustrating. Text messages work okay, it will just grab those when it gets a little signal. Otherwise, I miss a lot of calls.

What are your experiences with cell phone “dead zones”.. any remedies?

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PSTAM Update: Moving, DirecPath ISP Still Rocks

Review: Roku Digital Video Player

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 11 May 2009 03:27:58 +0000

From time to time, I have confessed my love for the Vudu set-top box that instantly streams up to 720p quality HD movies (or 1080p quality non-instant) over the Internet to your TV. The Vudu player is not subscription-based, so in addition to ponying up for the hardware, you have to pay an average of $3-5 each time you want to rent SD or HD quality movies. After a while of spending over $50 a month with the Vudu box, I decided check out the instant streaming landscape and take a look at the popular subscription-based Roku player. While the Roku player is often called the Netflix player, that is starting to change as it supports more services, most recently with the addition of Amazon Video on Demand.

Notice: During my review of the Roku player I was using an 80Mbps down Internet connection. Obviously this plays a huge role in the performance of a bandwidth-dependent streaming device. Your mileage may vary.

Roku 101

At only $99, the Roku player is one of the most affordable instant video streaming media boxes currently on the market. The Roku player launched just about a year ago, and has had frequent software updates such last December for Netflix HD streaming support and recently in March for Amazon Video on Demand support.

The rather plain Roku Box

Unboxing the Roku is a rather trivial event; there’s not much inside the box other than the Roku player, remote, cables, remote batteries and charger. Everything about the Roku experience is simple.

Roku Unboxing

First Impressions: The Roku player is light and small.

That can be attributed to Roku’s decision to spring for a flash memory approach instead of using a hard drive. There are three reasons why Roku went the flash route: 1) cheap!, 2) reliable compared to hard drives, 3) no need for active (noisy) cooling solutions.

Second Impressions: It’s a bit of an ugly duckling. Fortunately it’s small enough to hide behind my 5.1 receiver, PlayStation 3, Vudu box and HTPC.

Roku Player – Front

After unboxing the Roku and starting to hook up cables, I was quite impressed at how much this unit actually does for its size. It has all the connections you would expect – Component, Composite, HDMI, even the pretty-old-school-and-rare-these-days S-Video, alongside optical audio and Ethernet. But what caught me off-guard was the included 802.11b/g Wi-Fi support — something that Vudu makes you pay $80 to get in the form of a wireless dongle for their media box.

Roku Player Ports

Roku Player versus a Blu-ray disc case

Roku Player Remote

Ergonomically-speaking the Roku remote gets the job done and is the perfect size for natural placement of your thumb in the middle of the control. While I slightly miss the scroll wheel of the Vudu player’s remote, the large Roku remote buttons provide ample tactile feedback with a soft yet noticable clicking feel. Only 9 buttons inhabit the Roku remote and all are self-explanatory.

However, there is no power button on the remote. You can’t turn off the Roku player. It just intelligently goes to sleep on its own.

Showtime

Setting up the Roku player is a breeze. After plugging it in and hooking up the typical audio/video connections, there’s a simple on-screen wizard to follow. Chances are it will prompt you to update the firmware right after you setup your Internet connection, either via Ethernet or Wi-Fi. I tested out both connectivity options and had absolutely no issues with either. The Roku player supports WPA, WPA2 and WEP encrypted Wi-Fi networks along with networks that do not broadcast their SSID. Others have reported issues getting Wi-Fi connections to pass the “connecting to the Internet” step of the wireless configuration in the past; I’ll assume recent updates have allayed any such issues.

Roku Player Setup – Select Resolution

Roku Player – Netflix Getting Started

The next step is linking your Netflix account to the Roku player. I was supplied with a confirmation code to link to my Netflix account. That required logging into Netflix on my computer, but was all of a 15 second affair. A similar procedure is also required for linking the Roku player to Amazon for Video on Demand support. Regardless of these requirements, setup took just a few minutes.

Browsing Netflix & Amazon

Roku Player – Activate Netflix

The first “ahh, that sucks” moment I had was when I realized the Roku player does not let you actually browse and explore Netflix “Watch Instantly” titles. Instead, you must go to Netflix.com on your computer, browse around there and then add the movies or TV shows to your Netflix instant queue. Those titles will appear on the Roku player a few seconds later. A huge advantage of the Vudu player is that you can browse their entire collection of 10,000+ titles all from your TV — including searching by genre, title and actor.

After doing a bit of research, Roku’s decision to not allow Netflix browsing on the player was almost intentional. They wanted to keep everything about the Roku simple, and leave the complex bits to the Netflix website, which it’s very capable of handling already.

Roku Player – Browse Netflix Instant Queue

Roku Player – Browse Netflix, Movie View

Roku Player – Browse Netflix TV Show by Episode

Roku’s implementation of Amazon Video on Demand is a bit different. You have some limited browsing ability but not searching. Filtering options include sorting by new releases, genre, popularity and alphabetically, but if you’re looking to find something that isn’t really popular you will have to do lots of annoying side-scrolling.

Roku Player – Amazon Menu

In addition, Amazon purchases require a PIN code confirmation that you setup with your Amazon account upon linking the Roku.

Roku Player – Amazon HD Shows

Amazon Video on Demand content gives you several options, typically ranging from purchasing the video in either HD or SD, as well as renting it for 24 hours and previewing the first 2 minutes in HD.

Fast-forwarding and rewinding through both Amazon and Netflix movies and TV shows can be burdensome due to the streaming nature of the Roku player. Whereas the Vudu player would buffer the entire movie on its hard drive, making rewinding and fast-forwarding quick and seamless, the same cannot be said about the Roku player. To get around this issue, Roku engineers implemented a visual timeline of sorts. After selecting the frame you want to jump to, there is a 5-10 second loading delay, obviously dependent upon your connection. It’s an innovative solution, I’ll give them that.

Roku Player Scrolling. Yeah, LOTR Return of the King Extended Edition is no joke – 263 minutes long.

Pricing

Unlimited Netflix streaming plans start at $9/month. Amazon Video on Demand content on the other hand is a more like Vudu’s pricing model and has a pricing structure as follows:

TV Show (HD): $2.99
TV Show (SD): $1.99
24hr Movie Rental (SD): $2.99 – 3.99
24hr Movie Rental (HD): $3.99 – 4.99
7-day Movie Rental (SD): Some (crappy) movies can be rented for a week for $1.99
Movie Purchase (SD): $4.99 – 14.99

Quality & Performance

Before playing a movie, the Roku buffers for around 10-15 seconds. I have never had any network or connection issues during playback that resulted in halted playback and more buffering. Unfortunately, regular 480p Netflix offerings do not come close to MPEG-2 DVD quality. Noticeable compression artifacts can be seen below:

Example of Roku SD Quality – Still frame from Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Extended Edition

Amazon and Netflix HD streams are considerably better but not quite on the same level as Vudu and Apple TV HD offerings, both of which tout surround sound.

Example of Roku HD Quality – Still frame from Parks and Recreation

Another thing to note is that 5.1 is supported by the Roku player itself, but Roku reports that content providers (namely Netflix and Amazon at the moment) have yet to provide 5.1 audio encoding with their streams. You’ll have to get used to stereo sound for now. That being said, TiVo HD’s implementation of Amazon Video on Demand support works with 5.1 — so the Roku hardware itself is a bit to blame. TiVo downloads the entire file to its hard drive and plays from there, resulting in better picture quality and sound than the Roku video player. Just another drawback of a stream-only device.

That makes me wonder what would be possible if the Roku had a few gigabytes of flash memory on-board.

Talk Nerdy to Me

To satisfy my penchant for taking gadgets apart, I decided to open up the Roku player and snap a few pictures. While doing this, I learned a few things about the Roku player itself. For one, you can see flash RAM chips it uses for buffering (64MB) as well as the Nexperia media processor at the middle of the motherboard. The Roku player is actually based on the Phillips Nexperia set-top box platform (STB225), which revolves around a custom Linux OS in the case of the Roku player.

Roku Internals – Motherboard

As you would expect with a digital video player, the Nexperia media processor has support for hardware H.264 video decoding as well as WM9 among others. You can blame Netflix’s sub-par streaming quality to the Windows Media 9 codec they’re using, presumably to take advantage of its DRM features [sic].

Roku Internals – Motherboard

On top of that set-top box platform, it appears that Roku expanded to a daughtercard via a USB header to introduce 802.11b/g Wi-Fi support with the Atheros chip. Interestingly enough, there are connections for external antennas. If you are getting bad wireless range with your Roku, you could try hooking up two antennas to those (you’d likely need two U.FL-RSMA pigtail cables).

Roku Internals – Wi-Fi Daughtercard

The Verdict

The Roku digital video player is a grand slam of affordability, ease of use and convenience. However, this all comes at the expense of video quality and limited selection (only about 10% of Netflix’s massive 100,000 DVD collection is available for streaming). This is slowly changing though. The recent addition of Amazon Video on Demand (40,000 titles.. if you can find them) was a huge step forward for Roku and one of the main reasons I considered purchasing a Roku player. It has also been reported that Roku will release an SDK in the coming months for web video providers to add their content to the Roku player.

I give the Roku video player 8.5 out of 10 Stammys. It has its fair share of drawbacks but damned if it isn’t cheap! The Roku hardware itself supports 1080i streaming, so hopefully a future software update will bring this to fruition.

Are you a Netflix customer? Do you have a Roku video player? Would you consider one after this?

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Review: Roku Digital Video Player

Microsoft’s Laptop Hunters Ads: When Will They Stop?

Paul Stamatiou — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:05:16 +0000

If you haven’t caught wind of Microsoft’s Laptop Hunters advertisements by now, well you’re lucky. They’re a series of (hopefully only) six ads meant to take a jab at Apple’s successful “Get A Mac” commercials. So far four of these ads are out and they are based on the premise that some person is looking for a particular computer for their needs within a certain budget. If they find what they’re looking for, Microsoft pays for the computer. True in Microsoft spirit, these commercials are all full of issues. The first ad was filled with controversy after people discovered an actress was used instead of a regular person looking to go computer shopping. Also, while the ads are supposed to be “fair” and have the regular people consider Apple products as well, it was discovered in the first ad that the actress never even went into the Apple store. Looking at the clip shows the same person walking by as she enters and exits, and that’s just the first ad.

So what’s the point of this post? Nothing really. This is just a rant. As with any diehard computer geek like myself, the errors in these advertisements are just so irksome that I must voice my opinions. For example, in the video (the fourth ad) posted above, “Sheila” is a filmmaker looking for a laptop “that’s going to be able to cut video.” She ended up with an HP HDX laptop. For one, you don’t get a laptop with the intention of doing intense video work and you certainly don’t get a PC for video work (Final Cut Pro for OS X has the majority market share for video production and is the de facto standard). You get some ridiculous dual quad-core processor Mac Pro with loads of RAM.

Sheila does briefly consider the Apple MacBook Pro but quickly ignores it saying that it only has 2GB of RAM. I’m assuming she also ignored how Macs are ever so slightly more efficient with their RAM usage than Vista. And then there’s the fact that regular Vista can’t handle more than ~3.2GB of RAM regardless of how much physical RAM is installed in the computer. Let’s not mention either that RAM is ridiculously cheap so that MacBook Pro could have 4GB for $40 and actually be able to use it unlike the Vista box.

This video criticism wouldn’t be complete without highlighting some spot-on YouTube comments:

You are a professional film maker and you are at Fry’s getting advice about video editing, really?

“it’s got a widescreen” — which laptops these days don’t have widescreens?

So, the computer she settles on is crap. I own a Mac, I’ll go ahead and throw that out there, so I am biased… But here are the specs:
She settled for this:
HP 16-inch HP HDX 16t
4 GB of DDR2 RAM (600-1066MHz)
2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
GE Force 9600M GT 512 Graphics
and a 1366 x 768 max resolution display.

My MacBook Pro has:
2 GB of DDR3 RAM (800-1600MHz) (Faster+lower voltage)
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Identical discreet card+optional integrated graphics
and a 1440×900 resolution display

PWN

Idiots!
15′ macbook is better for video editing!
New macbooks haves DDR3!!
HP HDX has DDR2….. wtf??

iMovie, Final Cut are best videoeditingsoft ever! And only for MAC-users! )))

Microsoft sucks!

Okay, that’s my rant for the month. Carry on.

What do you think of Microsoft’s Laptop Hunters ad series? At least they’re better than the odd Seinfeld-Gates ads..

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Microsoft’s Laptop Hunters Ads: When Will They Stop?

Site Redesign: Everything’s Bigger In Texas Edition

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 04 May 2009 05:04:07 +0000

It has been almost 2 years since the last time I had a significant redesign of this blog. I figured it was time to start tinkering again. Instead of relying on the same blog theme and code base I have been working with for over 3 years now, I decided to use Chris Pearson’s Thesis WordPress theme as my base. For one, Chris Pearson is also a fellow Georgia Tech alumnus. Second, the Thesis theme boasts a lot of features and is built from the ground up with SEO in mind. That being said, it’s not free. I ponied up 164 greenbacks for the developer’s option so I could deploy the theme on as many sites as I wanted. (Psst: If you’re reading this in your RSS reader, you’ll want to click-through this time.)

I purchased the theme last week and have been learning the ins and outs of the hook system and going about using custom CSS and functions. It took a little while to grasp but after 2 or 3 late night sessions I came up with the site you’re looking at now. As you can tell from the title of this post, this version of PaulStamatiou.com is all about big. The highlight is increased readability through larger fonts, smooth typefaces and a wider layout. I’m looking forward to being able to put larger images within posts. I’ve been using Cabel’s Fancy Zoom for a year now but it will be nice to also view large images without clicking.

The redesign isn’t completely over, it has just gotten to the point where I can show it off. I’m considering incorporating Facebook Connect into commenting. However, the biggest hurdle will be optimizing this theme for performance. I’ve already put some things on Amazon CloudFront, then I’ll setup WP-Super-Cache and combine a bunch of the CSS files into one CloudFronted stylesheet. Oh and I’ll need to revisit my CSS/image sprites tutorial to combine several images I’m using into one.

I’ve also been interested in creating a sneeze page or two to help people easily find great articles hidden in my archives. And I’m thinking about removing post dates from URLs to make them shorter and a bit more search engine friendly, as outlined by Bruce Keener.

So that’s it. Browse around, let me know what you like, what needs work, what’s missing, et cetera. Thanks for reading all these years!

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Site Redesign: Everything’s Bigger In Texas Edition

I Don’t Like URL Shorteners

Paul Stamatiou — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:57:50 +0000

The other day I was talking with local entrepreneur Sanjay Parekh about a domain I had recently purchased. He commented on how it was rather short and could be also be used as a URL shortening service. That triggered a few responses on my end: 1) I feel that URL shortening services are very much a crowded “me too” space and 2) relatively few URL shorteners provide real benefits other than their primary utility.

URL Shorteners 101

By my count, there are somewhere between 90 to 100 URL shorteners that are even remotely used. There’s no doubt in my mind that at least 500 URL shorteners/redirection services exist in some working form online. We all know the premise behind them; you have a long, nasty URL that you need to share with someone either in some limited space, more recently Twitter, but originally from old email clients that hard wrapped lines and broke links in emails.

Thoughts

First off, my title for this post employs a bit of sensationalism. I’m not entirely opposed to URL shorteners, I just know they have a time and a place. I don’t like all of the blatant me too URL shortening services that offer no value-proposition over its competitors, other than just a really short URL.

Second, as Joshua Schachter seemed to focus on last week, URL shorteners add a delay to the end-user who clicks on them, with an extra DNS lookup. However, chances are all these common domains are already cached by the user, but the real issue for me is the uncertain lifetime of shortened URLs. I don’t feel this is a huge deal if shortened URLs are used properly. In the case of Twitter, how often do people read your tweets from last year and does it really matter if that link is dead? However, this is a big issue when shortened URLs are used in the ‘wrong’ types of situations – such as saved to your delicious or tumblr account, or posted on your blog – places that make it easier to find and follow URLs than Twitter. And when that happens search engines will start indexing those types of shortened URLs (bad URL shorteners use a temporary 302 redirect, causing search engines to place value on the shortened URL, ugh!); and that’s a problem when the URL shortener stops working.

Third, I like URL shorteners that do something in addition to shortening my URLs by 40 characters or what have you. Bit.ly is one of these services. At first I was jokingly shocked to find that a 6-character-long URL shortener received venture funding, when there are several 5-character-long URL shorteners online. Then I actually checked out bit.ly. They’re doing some impressive stuff including keeping detailed URL statistics in addition to making it easy to share shortened URLs and aggregate conversations around such URLs.

Example stats page of a bit.ly shortened URL

Unfortunately, many Twitter clients do not yet utilize the bit.ly API so you lose the stat tracking, but I digress.

In a more perfect world, two things could be different:

Twitter would have a separate area for links of any length, that do not count as part of the 140 character limitation, similar to how the late Pownce.com handled URLs.
Sites would have their own URL shortening services. I actually had my own URL shortener on this website back in 2006 after hearing about Shorty on Derek Punsalan’s blog and now I see Derek is using another method of shortening his URLs. As he points out, you get to maintain your own personal brand by having the shortened URLs come from your site, without risking anything.

Verdict: URL shorteners are a necessary evil. I only shorten URLs for Twitter and will only use a modern service that uses 301 redirects and does not have a middle-man interstitial advertisement or ad/iframe-bar, all the while providing me with some bells and whistles. For now, that is bit.ly.

Do you think URL shorteners are laying the groundwork for a future Web filled with dead links? What URL shortening service do you use? What do you use it for?

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I Don’t Like URL Shorteners