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New blog focus

As some of you may have noticed, I’ve started writing more reviews of products. While I’m not a huge fan of reviews that some people review (I don’t believe their unbiased or fair), I’ll let my readers be the judge of the value of my reviews. For the most part, people don’t send me products nor ask me to review software. These reviews are for products that I purchase; I do my own research and, of course, read other reviews before purchasing products.

If you have any questions about what I review, please ask and I’ll do my best to answer them. I’m quite critical of products as I don’t like wasting my hard earned money. If you like my reviews, please use the Amazon link on the right to make purchases.

If you think I own a product that you’d like reviewed, please let me know. I don’t review everything I own as I’d bore myself.

If you have a product you want me to review and aren’t afraid of my honest feedback, contact me and I’d be more than happy to review it.

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Review: PCT 4 port Coax Amplifier

I was having problems with my EyeTV recording digital channels and finally decided to give an amplifier a try. The EyeTV showed I had a signal strength of 20% which seemed low according to all the forums I read. After a bit of research I ended up with the PCT 4 Port amplifier.

It was fairly inexpensive from Amazon, but based on the reviews, I had high hopes for the little box. My only hesitation in getting any amplifier is that a cable tech had told me years ago that an amplifier put inline before my cable modem could cause problems. I received the amplifier about a week and a half ago and quickly plugged it in. EyeTV reported I had a signal strength of between 30 and 32%! That is about a 50% increase in signal strength; I had hoped for more, but that was a decent increase. So far, I have not had one recording that has been blocky and the EyeTV has been working quite well.

Pros

  • Inexpensive (a quality passive splitter costs about the same amount)
  • Easy to install
  • Excellent performance
  • Doesn’t seem to have affected my cable modem performance

Cons

  • I had to supply my own coax cable to connect the power supply to the amplifier; this would have been a problem, but I bought a few cheap coax cables recently

Overall

If you have to split a coax signal, I’d definitely recommend one of these. If you don’t have to split a coax signal and are having problems, this box is definitely worth a shot. However, as someone pointed out in a comment in another post, terminate all the ports that aren’t in use. In my case, all 4 ports are in use, so I didn’t have to terminate any ports.

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Misrepresentation or False advertising?

For our trip to New York, we stayed at the W Hotel in Union Square. We got a “special” rate for the room (I almost need to take out a loan to pay for it!) and the room was not bad. The W is supposed to be a boutique hotel that offers “Whatever/Whenever” service where the concierge can arrange almost anything. Of course, everything comes at a price.

One of the features that the W advertises is complimentary rides in an Acura MDX. I thought that was pretty cool as we had to get to the wedding one day. Not only would it save us a cab ride, I’d be able to ride in an Acura MDX which I hope to get someday (once the gas mileage gets up and I save up my pennies). I asked at the concierge desk to arrange the car and the concierge said, sure, but there will be a $78 one way drop fee and she suggested taking a $7 cab ride instead. Wow, so for a ride that was less than 2 miles, the W wanted to charge us $78 for a complimentary service.

Acura.jpg

I looked up complimentary on dictionary.com and here’s what it said (in this case, the W site uses it as an adjective):

given free as a gift or courtesy: a complimentary ticket.

There is no disclaimer on the site saying that there were restrictions and other fees associated with it. Is this just a misunderstanding or is it frankly false advertising? Considering each hotel has a limited number of cars (maybe even 1), they either don’t expect people to use the service or they add these charges so that no one uses it and it looks good on their site.

I went ahead and submitted a false advertising complaint on the FTC’s Web site. While I don’t really expect anything to come of this, it makes me feel better knowing that I at least made an effort to get this changed. I also sent email to the W Hotel; we’ll see what happens.

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A tale of two cities

This past weekend, my wife and I were in New York City (Manhattan) for my cousin’s wedding. I’ve been to NYC a number of times and frankly, I’m not a big city kind of person. After being in the city for less than hour, I started complaining to my wife. She didn’t want to hear it, so I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the trip. We got back to San Diego on Monday and I was back in my element.

On Wednesday, I took a nice stroll (1.5 mile walk) from our office to the San Diego Convention Center for CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment. This walk took me through downtown San Diego and so many things struck me as different from New York. First off, the weather. I realize that the city can’t control the weather, but it does have an effect. One day in New York, it was pretty nice, but then got cloudy and rained one day. Second, the streets were much cleaner in San Diego. Third, the city seemed to run at a much slower pace; in New York (in all areas except Little Italy), people were moving so quickly to get from point A to point B.

For some people, NYC is a great place to live; for me, it isn’t. San Diego has a lot of people, but it isn’t as dense. Up until I started my job 11 months ago, I really didn’t explore downtown San Diego. Since then, I’ve walked a bit around downtown and it isn’t that bad of a city. There has been a lot of revitalization and it really shows. If you’re willing to walk, parking isn’t all that bad, either.

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A geotagging tip for iPhoto

I one of my articles about using PhotoLinker and i-Got-U GPS, I had kind of a cumbersome method for geotagging the photos. Well, today I discovered an option in iPhoto “Rescan for Location”. So now my process is as follows:

  1. Import GPS tracks using igotu2gpx.
  2. Drop gpx file on PhotoLinker.
  3. Import photos into iPhoto.
  4. Drag photos from iPhoto to PhotoLinker.
  5. Geotag photos in PhotoLinker.
  6. Select photos in iPhoto, control click and select “Rescan for Location”.

This is huge for me as I don’t have to import the photos into the Finder, then into PhotoLinker and then import into iPhoto. My camera doesn’t show up as a Mass Storage device, so I had to take out my SD card and place it in a reader. With this new method, that isn’t required.

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Acquiring a GPS signal

Lately, I’ve come to realize that certain GPS units (including the Garmin Forerunner 305 and the i-Got-U 120) really only acquire the initial GPS fix when the devices are stationary. This can be a problem if I walk out the door and want to start tracking. Despite giving the units ample time to acquire a signal, they just never get one. Both units, I believe, use the SIRFStar III chipset. Is this issue inherent in this low power chipset or does it happen in all GPS units?

I’ve seen this behavior in USB GPS sticks as well that I think use the same chipset. Does anyone know if there is a way to make these units acquire the initial signal while moving? Once they get the signal, these units all work fine moving.

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HD vs SD pictures

I’ve been using the EyeTV for recording and watching most of my TV in the last few weeks. This has given me the luxury of watching shows in HD and I just realized that I’m now spoiled.

After a bit of fighting with the EyeTV where the signal strength and signal quality aren’t great and missing shows, I had to revert back to the TiVo to watch some shows.

EyeTV.jpg

We started watching a show and the quality difference is quite amazing. I’m hopeful that I can solve my EyeTV problems pretty soon with a signal amplifier. I’ve been hesitant to get an amplifier and place it between the incoming cable and my cable modem (my cable modem is at the same place as my TV and EyeTV; I have to split the line to handle all the devices) as a cable guy several years ago warned me that my Internet connection could be degraded by an amplifier. This, however, may have been because of the particular amplifier and wiring in my house (I have RG59 in most of my house and an old amplifier in the garage).

Luckily, the cable connection to all my equipment is basically a straight connection from the outside with one splitter that was installed by the cable company. So, I’ll get an amplifier and give that a try.

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Review: Harmony 880 Remote

Never goto Costco when you’re hungry. The other day I went to Costco to pick something up and walked out with a Logitech Harmony 880 remote. I had a Harmony 520 remote before and wasn’t all that impressed with it, but it has been a few years, so I decided to give it another try. With my new media center and TV, I now have 4 remotes to deal with everything, so life is much more complicated. Prior to my new TV and media center, my TiVo remote controlled the TV and TiVo, so I wasn’t used to multiple remotes.

When I first started configuring the remote, I saw the awful desktop software that hadn’t really improved since the 520 I had before. After a lot of work, I managed to get the “Devices” configured and things seemed to work. Where I really got confused was the activities; I just wanted to replace multiple remotes with one and switch between them. After more beating my head against the computer, I finally grasped the “activities”. For me, the activities are pretty simple, Watch TV, Watch EyeTV, Watch TiVo. I wanted to use the TV volume and have the rest of the controls work for the TiVo or EyeTV. In my first full day of testing, I can say that everything is almost working, but I’ve had to tweak the settings a half dozen times.

Time will tell if this will work out for me and be a true replacement for the jumble of remotes. After I’m satisfied with it, the next test will be to see if my wife will accept the remote. She’s very reluctant to change and I still haven’t had her “run” the EyeTV.

Pros

  • Great physical feel; reminds me of the TiVo remote.
  • Handles multiple devices.
  • Nice color screen.
  • Rechargable battery.
  • Pretty much can be configured to work with any device.

Cons

  • Desktop software is horrendous to use. It tries to walk you through everything which makes it cumbersome. Furthermore, it is some type of web app and really only a shell.
  • I’m not quite used to the keys; they don’t quite map to my remotes so I have to use the “soft keys”.
  • Tweaking controls takes time. For instance, each time I hit one key for the EyeTV, it sent the command twice. I had to walk through the help to fix it.
  • Concept of activities is hard for me to grasp.

Overall impression

The jury is still out; since I bought it from Costco and it isn’t a TV/MP3 player, etc. I can return it when I’m done evaluating it and it doesn’t have to be within 90 days. I’m going to keep working with it and see if I can work through the quirks as it is highly configurable.

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Analog vs. Digital Multi Meter

I’ve had a few multi meters in my life; my father bought me an analog one that I have no idea where it ended up. A few years back, I replaced it with a smaller one that was also analog. Everything that I’ve read indicated that analog meters were faster than digital meters as the needle jumps quickly to the value. This past week when I was assembling a cable for the MacBook Pro, I had to set the voltage to the 150 V DC range as the lower range went from 0-15 V DC. The MacBook Pro uses 16.5-19.5 V DC. The problem is that it’s really hard to tell if the voltage is 16.5 or 19.5 when the full range is 150; the difference amounts to 2% of the scale.

I went to Fry’s (the store I goto when I know what I want and don’t expect to return anything) and picked up the cheapest digital multi meter I could fine; it cost $10. As I don’t use a meter all that often, this would be more than adequate. Here’s a case where the digital meter performs much better than an analog meter; you can tell the difference quite quickly. Am I convert to digital meters? We’ll see.

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Better battery cable

The other day I wrote about the cable I assembled to connect the XPAL Power to MacBook Pro. Well, it was ugly and had far too much room for failure. I decided to try again, but this time a cleaner route. I picked up a 5.5 mm OD/2.1 mm ID DC power jack at Radio Shack (Fry’s didn’t have any), connected up a MagSafe cable (one was given to me from a broken power adapter), and now I have a clean looking cable with very little room for issues. While this required sacrificing a power adapter, this is definitely the better way to go. This time I was sure that I didn’t mess anything up as my searching turned up an article on connecting a MacBook to an airline/car adapter.