Don’t buy me (or anyone) an eBook reader for Xmas

MacWorld has an interesting article that details seven reasons why an eBook reader is a lousy gift. Some of the points are that Apple will inevitably release a tablet PC and render eBook readers (and netbooks) useless, that everyone that wanted one already has one, and that they aren’t discounted enough. Most importantly, you can use an iPhone for reading eBooks; hell, it even has a free Amazon Kindle app.

I just thought it was ironic that an electronics-minded website was telling people not to buy electronics.

Gadgetronic: Netgear XAVB101 Powerline Ethernet Adapter Kit

Great in theory, shitty in practice.

I bought the Netgear XAVB101 Powerline Ethernet Adapter Kit based on what someone had told me – that you connect one of the adapters to your router and plug it into the wall, and then plug the other one into the wall somewhere else in the house and then into your computer and BAM! you’ve got a 200mbps, secure LAN without any wires strewn across the house. Bet you didn’t know you could route the internet through your electrical system, huh? You can connect up to 16 adapters in one house, which means you could have super-fast gaming (it doesn’t require drivers, so it would work on the Xbox 360 and PS3) as well as internet downloads aplenty. The only thing stopping you would be your internet speed.

I picked this kit up because I thought it would be a great way to secure my iMac and keep the internet blazingly fast. On wireless, I was getting pretty good speeds, but not quite at what my ISP says I should be getting. After setting everything up, I tested the internet speed, and it was 1/3 the speed of my wireless LAN. I don’t know if it has to do with my house’s electrical wiring, but needless to say I was disappointed and took the thing back. Hopefully others will have better luck with it than me, but as it stands I can’t recommend it to anyone.

Gadgetronic: Thanks, Bulging MacBook Battery!

You know that feeling of impending doom the moment you start up a laptop for the first time, when you know that someday soon the battery will lose its charge and you’ll be tethered to a power outlet forever? And how you visit your laptop manufacturer’s site to see how much a new battery costs, and it’s $130, so you can’t really justify buying a whole new battery for that price for something that should just work anyway? And then you cry?

Luckily, the battery on my 2.5-year old black MacBook started bulging a few months ago. I have three months left on my AppleCare (which I would highly recommend, considering I’ve had a total failure on my Mac at one point, which would have cost over $1,000 to fix) so my wife took it to a nearby Apple Store and got me a brand spanking new battery. That alone paid for the cost of my AppleCare! I mean, yeah, the battery could have asploded on my man area, but that’s beside the point.

Getting an open NAT with Verizon FiOS and Xbox Live

I hope someday we’ll stop writing about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, but for now, it’s foremost on our minds. Matter of fact, we had an impromptu, partial-Threevue sesh just last night, fragging some mofos.

Of particular concern lately has been Tyler’s ability to connect to my Xbox 360; we weren’t able to play the Left 4 Dead 2 demo a couple weeks ago, and we can’t join a party of just the two of us. We’re thinking it has something to do with our NAT settings (mine is displayed as “moderate”).

I stumbled upon this forum which has the perfect solution to my configuration (Verizon FiOS and an Xbox 360 hooked up with one of those underpriced wireless adapter dongles). If you are having connectivity issues, this should work beautifully.

Now Shipping: 27″ Quad-Core iMacs

Lots of rumors have been floating around about when the top-end, 27″ quad-core iMacs would be shipping. The Apple online store has said “November” since they’ve gone on sale (Oct 20th for anyone keeping track) and forums have been feeding frenzies of Apple fanboys and photoshop pranksters. I personally think a lot of this is pure rubbish – how is it that Apple can get away with not informing their customers when our products will become available? We as consumers should be able to dictate when we are given a product, and should expect to be informed on the $2k investment being made.

Well, take it from me, they are in fact shipping. How do I know? Because mine is on its way, and will be here on Monday at the latest. For all my stalkers who think they can show up on my house and steal it from the FedEx man, back off, because I know karate. Or at least one of our writers does.

Google Chrome Released on Mac

New buzz browser Google Chrome was released on the Mac yesterday, and instead of writing anything about it, I decided to try out the new screen recording capability of Quicktime 10 (which comes free with Snow Leopard). You can download Google Chrome for the Mac here.

Wrangling Google Reader: Gruml and Byline

RSS feeds are web feeds for frequently updated works (blogs) which can be consolidated into one program for easy access. They can then be viewed online (via readers like Google Reader), on a standalone program, and even on an iPhone. Basically, I use them to view lots of blogs without having to go to a million sites every day. I’ve been using RSS readers for years now – first with Apple Mail’s built-in RSS reader, and then NetNewsWire until this past week, when I buried the RSS apps of old and jumped into new territory.

Gruml:
It’s no secret that the best online RSS reader is Google Reader – their interface is smooth and easy to use. The only online reader that was almost comparable was NewsGator, which synced with standalone app NetNewsWire (which has a PC counterpart, FeedDemon, but I’ve never tried it) until they gave up and started syncing it with Google Reader. Problem is, NetNewsWire doesn’t work as well with Google Reader as it did with NewsGator. This made me start looking for a replacement program, and I settled upon Gruml.

Gruml (pictured above) syncs perfectly with Google Reader and has a few great features, too, like being able to send articles directly to your Twitter, complete with shortened URLs. It also shows your unread count in the menu bar (nice touch). It’s currently in beta so it’ll only get better in the future. Totally free.

Byline:
I’ve been using the NetNewsWire iPhone app since its initial release in August of ’08, but I’ve never been that happy with it. It’s slow, clunky, and it just had a new update that actually made it less user-friendly. This “upgrade” drove me to look for other RSS iPhone apps, and I am currently loving the $4 app Byline, which runs amazingly fast, and is customizable well beyond any RSS app I’ve used. It even caches your feeds for offline viewing, should you be stuck somewhere without a signal (subway, doctor’s office, etc).

So there you have it. For $4 I can wrangle all my nerdy Google Reader feeds in three different ways.

iPhone Game: Rock Band

Again, I feel like an utter fool not knowing this was coming out until yesterday when it was already available on the app store (*aside, to self* I must be slipping in my old age!).

Q: Is this as good as RB on a major console?

A: NO, dummy. It’s still pretty good though. You have all the same instruments (don’t bother with singing. You don’t actually sing, it’s the same as guitar except you can only play one chord and the screen is flipped sideways). The songs are alright and the interface is almost identical to what you are used to.

Q: Does it even, you know, work?

A: For the most part. I have an almost two year old coughjailbrokencough iPhone with a shit-ton of games, music, apps and flotsam clanking around inside it. For me, playing the latter songs on HARD, it seemed like the synching was off and only half the notes were connecting. For people with a newer, faster 3GS, they probably won’t have any trouble at all. Most likely it was just the rapid succession of frets flying my way, if you want to master the harder songs you’re going to have to practice just like in the other versions.

Q: Okay, give us your overall.

A: Overall I like it. I played through the whole game on Drums/Medium in about two hours and really enjoyed doing it. Other instruments are okay but ultimately don’t compare to the enjoyment I think most people get out of hitting the skins.

Q: How much?

A: Yeeeeah… about that. The biggest obstacle to purchase (and it’s a big one) is that the app is $9.99. Ouch. But I’ve been hankering for a new game to play, and the reviews over at Toucharcade.com are pretty favorable so, what the hell.

Here’s the tracklist. Not including DLC:

Gadgetronic Video Test: Canon PowerShot SD750 vs SD780 IS

You may/should recall that last week my wife and I settled on a Canon PowerShot SD780 IS as our new “family” HD video camera (read: my wife’s new camera). It arrived in the mail yesterday, so we took a video to compare it against my two-year old Canon PowerShot SD750 (which films in SD).

My camera:

Our new camera:

What do you think? I can definitely notice the higher resolution, but I think I’m going to need a more active character to film to get the camera’s full potential. Don’t you worry though, Oliver will be plenty active soon enough.

Gadgetronic: Canon PowerShot SD780IS vs Flip UltraHD

After buying an SD camcorder last year and never using it, and after oggling at Mark’s Flip MinoHD videos, I decided that my little family needed an HD video camera to capture cute baby moments and monumental video game accomplishments.

I was initially drawn towards the Flip UltraHD, which sports 120 minutes of video, ease-of-use and a $179 price tag. But as my finger/mouse hovered over the “Checkout” button on my screen, I read a few reviews which argued that the Canon PowerShot SD780IS also captures HD video and a whole lot more (including taking 12.1MP photos) and costs only $229. What a pickle to be in, my little friends. One of the main reasons we don’t use our camcorder now is because it’s just not practical to walk around with a camera AND a camcorder. It kinda sucks, actually.

We went with the Canon. Was it the right choice? I’ll let you know next week when it comes in the mail.

Cycocorder, PPVideoEnabler, and Pixelpipe

So, I know this guy that recently unlocked his iPhone 3G using a program called redsn0w. His name rhymes with Pus Handle. It took only a few minutes, but it opened the phone up to all sorts of possibilities. Basically, it allows you access to the Cydia “App Store” which has all sorts of apps that the iTunes App Store won’t approve. Mr. Pus was a little hesitant about unlocking his iPhone, especially because this is what happened to his PSP after messing with it a few years back:

RIP, little guy.

Considering that someone else had unlocked his iPhone a few months ago and it still works, I thought I would be safe. I’ll write more posts about his discoveries, but for now, I wanted to talk about video recording. It’s one of the features that makes me want the iPhone 3GS, and it works fairly well on an unlocked iPhone 3G with an app called Cycocorder.

Cycocorder is free but is a little labor intensive. For instance, after you take a video, you have to take it off your iPhone using a secure FTP into the phone itself, which is a bit of a pain. From there, you would have to upload it to YouTube or whatever video service you use. Luckily, there are two apps that, when used together, can let you upload your Cycocorder-recorded videos directly from your iPhone.

There’s an app called Pixelpipe (free via the iTunes App Store) that allows you to upload photos and videos to all sorts of online services, like box.net, blogger, YouTube, facebook, MySpace, Dailymotion, and more. But you have to use a Cydia App Store app called PPVideoEnabler that will trick your iPhone into looking at your Cycocorder folder for videos. So, after figuring this all out and getting everything to play nice with each other, my friend can now take 15fps videos (with sound) and upload them directly to YouTube without having to use a computer at all. Granted, he doesn’t have a cool in-app video editor like on the 3GS, but he also got all of this for free. Here’s a video of Mark meeting the son that he may have fathered (we’re still waiting on the DNA test results):

Video Review: Cave Story

Joining the last.fm Revolution

If I could buy stock in last.fm, I would. And it isn’t just the fact that they have David Hasselhoff on their staff (Team Lifeguard). It’s a robust, many-featured music medium that is unbelievably free.

Let’s just run down a typical listening scenario. You have a fairly large mp3 library, organized on iTunes. During your commute to work, you listen to your iPod/iPhone. While at work, you listen to a streaming radio station like Pandora or your iPod. On your way home, same deal. At home after work, you listen to your iTunes library as you cook dinner and do the dishes. Sounds like a lot of different ways to play music, and would be impossible to correctly track right? Wrong. Last.fm works in five awesome ways which are highlighted after the break.

Gadgetronic: Your Ears Deserve The Best

There is no disputing the following fact of life: the Bose Acoustic Noise canceling headphones are the best things that you could possibly put over your ears, or any other body part for that matter.

I bought a set a couple years when I was doing a lot of traveling, and they were my best friends on long, boring flights across the Pacific. However, in recent history my demand for them has dwindled and they’ve been relegated to my electronics container/nerd box. Pulling them out the other day made realize what a travesty that is; you wouldn’t put the Mona Lisa in the bathroom of a Buca di Beppo would you?

The years of non-usage though has taken its toll on them. The pads are all haggard and falling apart, and the battery is stuck to where I can’t get it out. So this afternoon I took them to the Bose store to see if there was anything I could do, and they said they could give me a fresh new pair for only $100. Sold. I left with a brand new set of these bass-thumping beauties for 1/3 of the regular price. They have even gone through a couple redesigns and upgrades since I got my first pair, and they sound better than ever. As I’m typing this, I’m listening to Blood Brothers on full blast and it’s turning my brain into a bubbling glob of gray matter. Love it.

PSP Go (take a hike)

Joystiq has the scoop on Sony’s newest version of their PlayStation Portable: the PSP Go. It features a 16GB hard drive, no UMD slot, and no second analog nub. It’s supposed to “co-exist” with the current PSP; does that mean there will be a way to rip your old PSP games onto the PSP Go’s hard drive? Let’s hope so.

There’s still no word on whether than huge screen is touch-capable, but without a second analog nub, you can pretty much consider me not very excited. It’s funny how one little thing can ruin a whole device, huh?