Tag: gadgets

The Sound of Silence

The next door neighbour recently has a baby. Being a new born, it cries a far amount day and night so we noticed its arrival a few weeks back. Last week, the husband finally came over and knocked on our door and told us about their baby. (Duh! As if we can’t hear its crying through the wall and corridor)

Anyway, apparently our prime time TV viewing with the sound system on is disturbing the baby’s sleep which is fair enough. Also my late night Halo 2 session chatters also permeate through the wall into their bedroom, which is adjacent to our living room. Fortunately I was still at work when he came over so I didn’t have to deal with the awkward situation/conversation.

So to solve the first problem Leah and I decided (via SMS) that we should purchase another set of the awesome Sony wireless surround sound headphones so we can watch TV in silence. The only downside is the even after being on sale for over 6 months Sony still hasn’t release a spare headphones for the same model. This forces us to buy an extra complete set in order to have an additional headphones!

Even though these headphones do not use the Dolby Headphone technology (they use Sony’s own proprietary technology, go figure) they still produce very impressive surround sound. So much so that Leah thinks it is the best thing since slice bread. (Ok, may be I was exaggerating a bit here)

As for the Halo 2 session, not much I can do about it apart from playing less during the night and being quieter.

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Can you hear me now?

I’ve forgotten how much external sound my Shure E3c blocks out until I walked to work this morning using the standard Apple white headphones. With the Shure, the only sound I hear in the busy Manhattan street is the rumbling of the bus/truck engines. But with the Apple headphones, I can almost hear the conversation from across the street! So to compensate I have to crank the volume up from 50% (for my Shure) to at least 70% (for Apple headphones). Even then not all the noise are blocked.

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RTFM

Again, after listening to last week’s Security Now! podcast about Wi-Fi security (or there lack of with WEP and MAC filtering, which was what I was using) on Thursday, I semi-paniced and ordered two new Netgear Wi-Fi 802.11g adapters from Amazon.

But when I was digging around my PC this morning, trying to reduce the memory footprint of the system, I discovered that my laptop Wi-Fi adapter already support WPA-PSK security. So I went ahead and changed the router and laptop settings, and it works! And lo and behold, my old Titanium Powerbook also works with WPA-PSK! What an idiot, I feel… I could have a much more secure network for months!

So when the new adapters arrive from Amazon, I’ll have to return them. Not a big hassle but still I feel bad ordering them in the first place without doing my own due diligent.

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Electronic Karma

A long time ago, in a country far far away called Britain, I was working as a software consultant being paid handsomely. I bought the latest PC laptop from Gateway when I already had a top of the range desktop just because I could afford one. It had all the leading edge technology then; Pentium III 500 MHz, 15″ LCD display, etc. Until I moved to NY 18 months later, the only travelling that laptop had done was between our apartment and the office which is about 15 minutes walk if I walked slowly.

Then after six months of trans-Atlantic travels the Titanium Powerbook had replaced the Gateway and it was relegated to the dark corner of the cupboard. And there it stayed until we moved to Hoboken. But I had my faith in it and took it along with us through two moves. I knew one day I would find a useful task for it.

The Gateway was briefing let out to stretch its legs when I was between jobs and started the ecto project, which requires working in a Windows environment. But again, it was banished back to the cupboard when the Compaq laptop arrived.

Finally last week I’ve found a good home for the Gateway. My boss’ sister who is living temporarily in NY and earning $120/week, before taking up a job in Boston was lacking a computer. My boss had already tried giving her his wife’s old laptop but that one’s hard drive died soon after. So when I learnt of her predicament, I knew that’s where the Gateway should go to restore the electronic karma. Thus I have reduced the number of laptops in the apartment from 4 to 3 and the once spurious machine is now a reliable servant for someone in need.

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Laptop replacement

The San Francisco vacation was the first real test of the Treo 650 since I bought it back in March earlier this year. Initially I had my doubt as to its effectiveness as a communication device due to the buggy VersaMail application. The app, when it is working, is a competent enough of an email application. It handles POP3 and IMAP accounts well. But the problem is that it doesn’t work most of the time! In no apparent pattern VersaMail will reset itself. Sometimes that’s all that is, a reset; but a lot of the time it will either lost all the accounts and mails, or just refuse to work (i.e. reset upon starting) due to corruption of its database.

Then I found Chatter Email while trolling TreoCentral‘s forum. Initially Chatter only supports IMAP account so I didn’t pay much attention to it and persevered with VersaMail. Then a beta version of Chatter was released with POP3 support as well as saving mailbox to SD card, so I started using it in place of VersaMail.

The real test came at the beginning of last week when I arrived in San Francisco with my Treo as the only connection to the internet (stealing bandwidth at Apple Store doesn’t count, really). Chatter outperforms VersaMail in every aspect but one. Chatter doesn’t reset randomly for a start and its rich feature list make emailing on Treo almost feeling like I was using a desktop application. The only two missing features that I would like to see is an ‘active’ outbox and spellchecking.

‘Active’ outbox is where I can ‘send’ an email offline (perhaps I am out of coverage, for example) and Chatter will automatically connect and sends the pending email either on scheduled connection or when coverage is resumed.

Treo’s SMS app does this outbox feature really well. It allows me to reply to text message while in the subway without worrying about sending the message proper when I get out of the station and have coverage again.

As for web browsing, Blazer is good enough (that ‘e’ word again) for the small screen size. I was getting resets on the first day until I switched off JavaScript. Why that causes resets in Blazer, I have no idea.

For moblogging, I have two options: via email to TypePad, or u*Blog via XML-RPC. I prefer u*Blog because it allows me to set post category which I can’t do with email. The only feature lacking is the ability to retrieve existing posts from the server and allow editing of them. But, u*Blog serves my purpose last week well enough.

I also used Chatter Email to send photos I took with the Treo’s camera to Flickr which as you can see, works perfectly.

I didn’t try out any RSS readers simply because I didn’t find a free reader that appears to me and I was too busy to look further. In theory, if I had a competent RSS reader the Treo will definitely up to the job for my communication needs during short trips away from my laptops.

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