Category: reviews

This Summer we did our annual road trip from Washington to Colorado, this year with our 3 year old and .5 year old we decided it might be a good idea to pick up a portable DVD player, they seemed cheap and can always be plugged into TV to play indoors as well. I originally planed on getting one of the cheapest ones I could find, which is usually my goal, and rarely what I end up doing.

The cheaper portable DVD players seem to be the fold out kind, similar to laptops and they seem to have a few less features, such as video in, just incase you wanted to play a video game on them or plug in your video camera (more likely). After reviewing online sites, and vowing never to go to Best Buy ever again, I decided on the:

Nu Tech CineTrek WDR041 Portable DVD Player

Manufacturer:
NUTech Site

Retailer: (also available at newegg)
ZipZoom Fly site

Price $209-$50 rebate = $159 no tax or shipping

Pros:

• Accessories. Comes with a number of accessories that are useful. A bag for the batteries and wires, and important to me, a strap for connecting to the back of a car headrest (which seems like it would fit any size car.
• Small. It easily fits in front of the kids, without hanging all over the place.
• Full Function Remote control (more controls than the unit has, don�t loose it)
• Flip function to flip the picture over. A small but usful feature since the power plug in the car might be on the right or left of the player where it plugs in� so you end up not having to string wires over the kids.

Cons:

• Not very loud, Isabella constantly asked for it to be turned up, but with headphones it is as good as anything else.
• Subtitle default to on (there may be a setting for this)
• Screen not very well protected
• Does not seem very rugged (though I have not had any trouble)
• If you loose the remote, you loose a lot of controls

Since getting back from the trip, and moving to a new place, where we do not have cable and did not setup a TV in our room, this little player with the kickstand has been a nice way to watch Netflix in bed, either on the nightstand or on the bed.

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I recently got a PSP from a very good great friend for my birthday. Not something I would splurge on myself with, being that when you have a job and a house and 2 kids, video games quickly become a time luxury that gets surpassed by things like trying to read, take out the trash or like... eat and sleep. But that aside, the thing is dope, the design of it is just slick, it is made to be touched and looked at as much as possible. So much in fact that if I have it on my desk I find the need to cover it up with something so I don't pick it up and start playing with it during the few seconds I have while Photoshop loads, oh precious few seconds.

This brings me to what is probably my favorite feature, and most practical. Sleep. With a flick of the power button at any point, the system goes to sleep, from a pause screen to the middle of a race the system nods off with a flick. Then when you are ready again, say that the conference call starts to get boring…again, flick it again and you are right back to where you were, pause screen or in-game. Brilliant _and_ practical.

Needless to say the screen is gorgeous, amazingly gorgeous, buttons feel great, sound over the headphones is very good. It is also nice to have speakers integrated in the unit, unlike the iPod. They are no Kicker 12’s, and are fairly quiet at full volume but it is nice to have something that you can listen to MP3’s without headphones. The included 32MB memory stick is a joke, like selling a car with a 2 gallon gas tank, if you expect to use the system for anything other than games. A 1GB Memory Stick Pro Duo (yeah Sony naming!) can be had for around 100$ (macmall/buy.com/newegg) _if_ you can find one in stock, they seem to be in short supply. Not a terrible price really in relation to a 1GB iPod shuffle at $150 in my head.

I have Lumines and Ridge Racer. I am a RR fan, and if you like it on the consoles it is the same here, great graphics and drifting. Lumines is a Tetris style block building puzzle game, terribly addictive and a lot of fun, puzzle games are so perfect for portables in my mind, Tetris on the original game boy is still a latent image burned into my retinas that I can see when I close my eyelids. This is the same type of thing, lots of incentive to play and progress to open up level which are vastly different, making the levels every changing look part of the challenge. Both great games, but there are not many others I would like to pick up, maybe THPSUG2REMIX, but with new games at 49$ a pop, I am a bit cautious and will wait for used and price drops (U District Hollywood has some good used stock, got Lumines there for 31$). Sites like psp-vault are hosting game saves pulled from the memory card as well for the cheaters out there, just download load on the card and startup.

The whole method of placing video on the PSP can really only be described as retarded. See IGN's write up or How to get video on the PSP (engadget) and get your MP_ROOT\100MNV01 on, or check out PSPware for the Mac, it is slick. WiFi connection was easy at home, to check for network updates, and the USB connection gave me not problem at all, very straight forward.

Good stuff Sorny.

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After loosing my data hard drive recently to what appears to be a broken armature (meaning it is screwed), I have had to find out about recovery and back up options. It appears one of the big names in recovery is, DataSavers. A few recovery facts; it costs the same to recover one file as the whole drive, the cost is depended on the size of the drive, and in my case with a 160GB is was between $500 - $2500 and they said 90% of jobs come in on the top 1/3rd. I opted not to do that.

Since I have purchased 2 new drives, one another SATA internal and a new IDE external to replace the downed drive. The previous drive was a Maxtor, so I'd be damned if I was going to buy another one of those, and after talking to some Techs, I was told they are crap. I was told to go with Western Digital or Seagate, Seagates have a 5yr warranty as opposed to a 3yr so I went with them. So I ended up with a 200GB system drive, 200GB SATA internal data drive, and a 200GB external using a Metal Gear external firewire drive.

For backing up, I wanted something I did not have to think about, very easy, schedue-able and transparent.

Windows XP has built in back up software in Accessories > System Tools > Backup. I tried this, it schedules and is built into the OS which is great, and it allows you to specify what folders you want backed up and but it backs up to special .bkf file which then needs XP to restore the compressed file. I wanted something more sure, plus I wanted to be able to swap drives to another computer easy if something happened.

Now the Seagate IDE drive came with backup software, BounceBack Express. It seemed cool enough, it lets you schedule full file backups at regular intervals but, it was a piece of shit. Mainly because it is an application that needs to load, so it takes up resources. Working the night after I installed it, my floppy drive started making clicking noises every few seconds, plus I began to get "Delayed write failures" in XP, like every 2 seconds. I uninstalled the app and all the problems went away. Bad software, stay away.

Then I found MirrorFolder., a product from Calcutta, India. A slick little app that integrates into XP and allows you to choose which folders to mirror to another location, local drive, network drive, or even on the same drive. You can exclude file types or folders (excluding things such as PSD temp scratch disk files) and it does not need to schedule because it works constantly in the back ground. It totally integrates into XP, so there is no extra app to startup or to sit in the tray, just right click on what you want to mirror, folder or drive and set it up, just like it is part of XP. So far I have not seen a noticeable performance hit and it can also be used to sync drives from notebooks to local drives and such. Free for 30 days, 39$ after that, cheap for piece of mind.

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Link: Amazon.com: Music: Convicts

Audio CD (April 25, 1995)
Label: Virgin Records
Catalog: #40455
ASIN: B000000W8V
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 388,300

Price = $99 used.

Yes I own this album (well, me and Dan, it's like both of ours but we just keep it at his house)

When I was looking at cameras online I looked for images comparing the relative size of the Elura 50, but I could not find any... so here they are. Btw, it's tiny.

Punch Druck Love
Great movie. I had heard this was a serious role for Sandler so I shy'd away from it thinking it would be serious (read depressing), but quite the contrary, it was very artistic and beutiful. Great movies make you want to be creative and this one does that.

Mario Golf : Toadstool Tour
I may not have given this one enough time, but I was not impressed, it does have polish but the default play is just too simplistic, using only the A button to swing and only having to press it once. Granted there is the option to make it more difficult with the A and B button, but I would still take Tiger Woods 2004 over this.

Soul Caliber II
Great game, as you know. Fast deep and fun.

Advance Wars
One of my all time favorites, though I have not picked up number 2 yet, this is the Tetris of the Advance I think.

Ninja five-O
Classic, I loved the bionic arm man game on the NES and nija gaiden and this is a great retake on those titles.

I posted earlier a link to the iPodding iTrip review, and have had mad hits on it ever since, almost as many as the post on the "Do not disconnect" issue.

Buying
I used Froogle to search for iTrip prices about a week ago, and found Buy.com to have them for $31.99 but to be out of stock, so I signed up for email notification of in stock, got the email a couple days later and purchased the item off the site minutes later. Two days later I received an email saying "We are still working on shipping the following item", then the next day the item shipped and I received it a few days later. $31.99 + $5.16 ground shipping = $37.15, maybe I could have done better but not too shabby.

Opening:
Package is very much like the iPod packaging with is nice, buy.com packaged it in a huge box with a ton of those damn peanuts, props to Amazon for the air in a bag method. Simple package, iTrip(tiny), CD(pc/mac), and Instructions(1 page foldout, very mac-like)

Using:
The first thing you do is install the CD which just places a bunch of basically mp3 files into your musicmatch folder(using a pc), then you hookup the ipod and download the "files" as a playlist. all very simple straight forward and easy, so now you have an iPod with a playlist that is full of files titles "100_1, 100_2" and so all corresponding to FM radio station frequency.

Next I went to the closest radio which was an analog dial tuner and started to play with trying to tune it to the default frequency of 87_9, no luck, tuning analog is difficult to really nail the right channel that the iTrip is broadcasting on, but it can be done. Next I tried it on our Sony under-counter kitchen radio with a digital tuner and everything was all good. Not the best reception but good enough. The most annoying thing being that the iPod had to be as close as possible to the radio to sound good enough, meaning I had it sitting basically on the radio, not the counter below.

I did this for a while with all our different radios and then tried different frequencies. The procedure for changing the frequency is to play one of the earlier downloaded files and then pause it as the ipod send the info the iTrip, here I ran into a little trouble. You MUST have the volume of the iPod set to between 40% and 80% to make it work, if the volume is too loud the iTrip will not get the info and not change the frequency. Not a big issue just at first I did not get that, even though it says it in the instructions.

I found that 91.7 works pretty good here in Seattle. The iTrip has worked great so far in the car even driving around town there are only a couple spots where the radio breaks in, but overall it is a really great product.

It looks great, is small easy to use, and designed to work as promised and allow you to charge the iPod while using it. The only issue I do kind of have is the little stub that plugs into the FW port forces the cover for the port to stay open, but what can you do.

I would definitely recommend this product, now all I need is a car charger, and I am looking at you powerpod.

Update: 07/25/03 - Since purchaced the powerpod and I am diggin on that too, seems like the way the go, the small adapter can stay int he car and the extra firewire can be user for the wall charger while the ipod firewire can stay plugged into the computer.

I have also found 107.3 to be the best station to use fro me in Seattle, not sure if having the at a higher number makes a difference.

Hey if you read this review, go ahead and leave a comment, nice nasty whatever, but let me know what's up?

Update 08/21/03 - MacWhispers has a good review of four of the top FM transmitters, though they give the iTrip the lowest rating of the 4, the compactness of the solution I think is slick enough for my use. He has since pulled this review unfortuntley due to ethical questions. poo-poo that.

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Josh posted about these dudes over at teamnull. A full stream is available here. (though real player blows). Dope stuff.

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UPDATE 6/22/03: see My Review Posed here

iTrip Review from ipodding.com

Conclusion

If you want to wirelessly broadcast iPod's audio, iTrip is the way to go. We likey!

Any one get one yet?

UPDATE 6/22/03: see My Review Posed here

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I just got this album out from the back of my iPod, man what a great freakin' album, you should probably buy it if you don't have it. Or ask me and I'll send you some songs.

UPDATE: I realized I forgot to mention I am talking about ex-local rockers Modest Mouse- The Moon & Antarctica, I just like the line I used as the post title.

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For our anniversary, and in return for my Gameboy SP, I recently got Kristin a new camera, or more accurately a used camera. A Polaroid Land 195, originally produced: 1974-1976 / original retail: $199.95, it is a sweet little machine.

I got it off ebay for $280 with some extras. It is basically a Polaroid camara like anything else but with a glass 114mm, f/3.8 4-element Tominon lens.

It works with Polaroid film currently available and does black and white and color images with great results, it has such a soft depth of field and nice borders. I recommend it, plus it is just cool when products last and are usable 20-30 years later, especially something so technical and touchy. They actually still make them new, but they are not made by Polaroid any more, they are made my a company called NPC.

More old Poaroid info.

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