Nokia E61 First Impressions

Posted by Scott Laird Sat, 17 Jun 2006 05:10:08 GMT

I love FedEx–they somehow managed to deliver my new Nokia E61 today instead of Monday, so I have the whole weekend to play with it.

A few first impressions:

  1. It’s much more solid then it appears on the website. It has a metal case, and everything about it feels well-made.
  2. The screen is wonderful. It’s big, bright, and easy to read. While doesn’t have as many pixels as some of the other models in Nokia’s latest lineup, I have nothing to complain about. The text fonts for the browser and office apps are small enough that it’ll fit a lot of text on the screen.
  3. It seems to work fine with Asterisk. I was able to make and receive a few VoIP phone calls over WiFi without any problems.
  4. The built-in web browser works well enough. I was able to check gmail and look up a few directions without a problem. Strangely, the only site that hasn’t worked for me is http://www.google.com. I think Google’s trying to feed the phone a WAP page or something, while the phone is expecting HTML. It shouldn’t be hard to fix.
  5. Google Maps for Mobile phones works great. That’s half of the reason that I wanted a new phone :-).
  6. The audio quality is better then my old T616.
  7. The keyboard is good. I’m not used to the layout yet, and it’s weird having to hit a shift key to get numbers, but it’s better then Graffiti.
  8. I’ve had some weird problems when copying large files using the USB cable. For some reason, the transfer locks up from time to time. Unplugging the cable solves the problem without rebooting either end, but it’s annoying. I should probably find a USB-to-SD adapter; it’ll be faster.

I’ll post more later, once I’ve had a chance to really break it in.

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The Family Trade and The Hidden Family

Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 08 Aug 2005 17:51:10 GMT

I’m a big fan of Charlie Stross; I think I’ve now read all of his published fiction. I’ve mentioned his books a few times here; he’s probably my favorite author at the moment.

That’s part of why I didn’t read The Family Trade when it came out last fall–it was originally written as the first half of a larger novel and then split into two by the publisher. I didn’t want to get engrossed in The Family Trade and then suddenly have the book stop halfway through the story. The second half, The Hidden Family, came out recently, so I ordered both of them from Amazon and settled in for a bit of reading.

Stross is generally a science fiction author, but this series is more or less fantasy. That is to say that it’s based on the same premises as about half of the fantasies clogging up your local bookstore, but it’s written by a good science fiction author and he spends a lot more time dealing with technology, politics, and economics then I’m used to seeing in fantasy. In the end, I’d say that this series is fantasy in about the same way that Stephenson’s baroque books are historical fiction–deep down, I know that they’re really scifi, with the “traditional” scifi elements hidden by the trappings of a different genre. That makes me feel a lot better about these two books, because normally I wouldn’t be caught dead reading fantasy.

Another difference between Stross’s new series and most of the fantasy I read when I was younger is the protagonist–instead of a stupid (or at least inexperienced) late teen/young adult wandering around lost in some fantasy land, Stoss gives us Miriam Beckstein, a thirtysomething first-string tech journalist with a MD and a history of backing Larry Ellison-types into corners. She’s still stuck with the fantasy land, but she comes to grips with things and is good at landing on her feet.

All in all, I enjoyed the two books. Perhaps not quite as much as I enjoyed The Atrocity Archives, but more then most of the other books that I’ve read recently. Surprisingly enough, the two books actually do fairly well on their own–they were divided at a natural breaking point, where most of the early plot threads were resolved before moving into a new set of issues in the second book. There’s a third book planned for next May or June.

I’ve been able to get a lot of reading done over the last couple weeks–I’ve been taking the bus to work, so I have about 90 minutes of reading time per day (instead of 90 minutes of driving time). Here are the others that I’ve finished lately:

  • The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. Basically an alternative history where the Plague killed Europe off in the 1300s, so Islam, India, and China are left sharing the world. It has a few interesting plot devices–the main characters keep getting killed off and then reincarnated back together again–but it was a painfully slow read for me, and when I was done I realized that I’d have to re-read it several times to fully understand what the heck just happened. Call it 3 stars.
  • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling. Yeah, I read it too. Everyone’s read it. The ending worked okay for me.
  • Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson. I liked his Cronoliths, but Blind Lake didn’t really do it for me. It doesn’t quite pull a deus ex machina at the end, but it’s pretty close.
  • Jumper by Steven Gould. I added this to my list after a glowing recommendation on Boing Boing earlier this year. It’s obviously a juvenile, but it’s well written and manages to cover old ground (the “Wow, I can teleport!” story) without sounding like a retread. I’d probably have enjoyed it more if I’d read it when I was a lot younger–some of the coming-of-age stuff was kind of tedious.

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Sipura SPA-841 first impressions

Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 15 Mar 2005 20:06:59 GMT

I ordered a Sipura SPA-841 SIP phone from VoIPSupply.com last week, and it arrived last night. I haven’t had enough time with it yet to write a really comprehensive review, but I’d like to share a couple first impressions.

First–the SPA-841 is a lot smaller then I’d expected. It’s under half the volume of my Cisco 7940. It fit into a 2” tall FedEx mailing box, which I didn’t expect at all. Even though the base is small, it’s not very light–it feels like a real office phone, even if it’s a lot smaller then most of the office phones that I’ve used. It doesn’t seem to slide around too much on my desk.

Once I plugged it in, it booted very quickly. The Cisco phone takes around 30 seconds to boot, while the Sipura is ready for use in under 10 seconds.

The SPA-841 comes in a box with no documentation. Once you plug it in, you can configure it via HTTP using a web interface that the phone provides. Supposedly it’s also possible to feed it a configuration file, but Sipura only gives out the configuration file documentation and tools to VoIP service providers, not end-users. Personally, I’d rather edit text configuration files on a server and upload them to the phone then fiddle with the hundreds of settings that Sipura provides on their web interface, but if I’m only dealing with one phone, it isn’t a big difference. If I end up buying another couple SPA-841s for around the house, I’ll probably start agitating for open provisioning tools.

Even though there isn’t a whole lot of documentation, the phone isn’t too hard to configure. I spent about 15 minutes with it and had it accepting incoming calls, dialing out, and handling voice mail. The voice mail light (Message Waiting Indicator, or MWI) is just a dinky red LED sitting in the middle of the phone; I really like Cisco’s MWI a lot better. The Sipura also provides a MWI stutter dial tone, and it’s hard to miss that, even if you don’t see the tiny LED shining at you.

At this point, it seems to work, but I’m not completely happy with the way it’s configured. Once I’ve finished tweaking the config, I’ll write up a full review with pictures comparing it with the Cisco phone and provide a few configuration recommendations.

Update: I haven’t had time to finish the review yet, but I wanted to add a couple quick notes:

  • The phone does come with a getting-started flyer, a glossy 8.5x11 mini-booklet with directions for plugging it in, connecting it to the network, and configuring it to talk to a few different SIP providers. It doesn’t come with anything more substantial. Sipura’s website has had a 71-page PDF Users’ Guide for a while, and just recently added a 79-page PDF Admin Guide. I haven’t had time to read the admin guide yet.

  • The audio quality seems perfect. I’ve only spent a half-hour or so on the phone, but I haven’t noticed any dropouts. The handset is pleasantly loud.

  • The latest firmware release, 3.1.1 (the update from last week’s 0.9.5–nice version number jump) includes support for “SIP-B,” which is apparently a standard being pushed by a few phone and softswitch vendors that make it easier to add PBX-like features to SIP phones. This includes bridged line appearances, shared missed-call DBs, called-number ID (the opposite of caller ID–it shows the name that goes with the number that you dialed), standardized call park/pickup support, and a few other useful features. Unfortunately, the SIP-B spec doesn’t appear to be public right now, even though the vendors involved have made some attempts at running pieces of it through the IETF’s standardization process. I suspect that SIP-B is really just a blanket name that covers a bunch of small, independent SIP enhancements that will be pushed through the I-D/RFC process one at a time, but for now there’s no real documentation available. Hopefully that will change soon so Asterisk can better support SIP-B hardware. (Micro-update: Sylantro has sent me a pile of documentation on SIP-B. I’m not sure that it’s complete, but there’s quite a bit of it, and they’re getting ready to put it on their website. So I’m mentally adding them to the “good guys” list when it comes to standards compliance and promotion)

  • Several people have mentioned that they’ve had problems with the rubbery phone buttons on the SPA-841 sticking. I suspect that they’ve fixed this with more recent phones, as mine has been perfect. I wouldn’t say that the buttons are as nice as Cisco’s, but I don’t have any complaints.

I guess that’s a good summary of the phone–it’s not as nice as Cisco’s phones, but I have no complaints about it, either. It seems to work well enough, it has a decent feature set, and it’s cheap. I’d love to see them add PoE support, a ‘SPA-842’ model with a built-in Ethernet switch, a backlight for the LCD and buttons, and some way of supporting external dialing directories, but none of these are really critical–as it is, the phone works quite nicely, and I’ll probably order 2-3 more SPA-841s over the next few months.

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InFocus X1a projector review

Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 30 Dec 2004 02:44:05 GMT

As mentioned earlier, we bought an InFocus X1a projector last month. Here are the basic specs on the X1a:

  • DLP with 2x color wheel
  • 800x600 resolution
  • 37 dB
  • 6.8 lbs
  • 1100 ANSI lumens
  • 2000:1 contrast ratio
  • 3 inputs: composite video, SVGA video, VGA. VGA supports HDTV component input via adapter cable
  • Supports computer resolutions up to 1024x768 and HDTV up to 1080i, downscaling as needed

There are two common flavors of projectors; DLP projectors and LCD projectors. In general, LCD projectors are a bit cheaper and have a bit better color, while DLP projectors have darker blacks and last longer. The X1a is a DLP projector, but I’ve been very impressed with the colors that it produces. The one downside to it is that it only uses a 2x color wheel–DLP projectors work by bouncing light from a lamp off of a “DLP” array, which consists of thousands of micromirrors that can be moved to create a picture. The DLP array doesn’t contain any color information; instead the projector uses a spinning color wheel to display red, green, and blue information in sequence. High-end DLP projectors use up to 6x wheels, which display each color repeatedly for each frame of video. Cheaper projectors, like the X1a, use 2x wheels. Some people’s eyes can see color fringing from slower wheels; I can sometimes catch it out of the corner of my eyes, but I don’t find it annoying.

The X1a is a cheaper version of the popular InFocus X1; it trades slightly longer lamp life for the X1’s Faroudja deinterlacing chip. Since we’re planning on feeding it progressive-scan video directly from a PC, the fancy deinterlacer doesn’t do us a whole lot of good. Since the X1a ended up being about $65 cheaper, it seems like a better deal.

Right now, the projector is hanging from the ceiling in our bedroom, projecting its image onto the wall at the foot of the bed. We haven’t done anything to the wall–it’s just a normal textured white wall. The projector is about 10’ from the wall, and it projects a 7’ image. For comparison, the biggest rear-projection TV that I could find is Sony’s 70” XBR Grand WEGA. I’m sure the Sony has much better image quality, but it costs $7,000, while my $740 projector produces an image that’s over a foot wider.

When used in a dark room, the X1a produces wonderful images. I’m very impressed with its color reproduction and brightness. It looks stunning. As the room gets brighter, the image quality starts to fade. Our bedroom doesn’t have particularly dark shades, but the projector is still usable in full December sunlight. It’s hard to pick details out of dark scenes, though. I’m not sure how well it’ll work in summer–we’ll probably need to pick up some black-out shades.

The X1a’s native resolution is 800x600; when projecting a 84” diagonal image, that gives us roughly 12 pixels per inch. As you’d expect, each pixel is clearly visible from close up, centered in a black “screen door” pattern. At normal viewing distances, I don’t find the screen door objectionable at all, and you get dampen it a bit by defocusing the projector slightly if it really bothers you.

Like most modern projectors, the X1a has a “keystone” adjustment, so you can project rectangular images even when the projector isn’t perfectly perpendicular to the screen. Architectural photographers face the same type of problem when taking pictures of buildings–if the camera isn’t perfectly level, the buildings don’t appear square in the image. Photographers know there are two ways to fix this sort of distortion–you can either get a lens that you can shift to control the distortion, or you can fix it in Photoshop afterwords. Generally, using the right lens produces a better image, but Photoshop is cheaper and faster. The X1 takes the “Photoshop” route, and rescales the image in software to correct for keystoning. This is very noticeable when you’re feeding it an 800x600 image from a computer–some scan lines go fuzzy, when they should all be perfectly sharp. To fix this, you need to either align the projector correctly and then disable the keystone correction or live with a crooked image. I assume that high-end projectors have shiftable lenses, but the X1a clearly doesn’t reach into that price range.

All in all, I’m really happy with the projector. My only real complaint is that it doesn’t ship with a remote control, so I’m forced to use the power switch on the side of it to turn it off and on. Since it’s hanging from our ceiling, that’s a pain. I suppose I could pay them the $60 they want for a remote (with presentation keys and laser pointer), but I’m currently too cheap for that; I’ll shop for a universal remote that can drive their projectors instead.

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Treo 600 vs 650 Review

Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 08 Dec 2004 21:03:33 GMT

X-Gadget has a Treo 600 vs 650 comparison review up. Summary:

  • The sound quality is slightly worse on the 650, but still better then most phones.
  • The screen is vastly better.
  • The camera is much better.
  • The CPU is a lot faster.
  • The software is slightly improved.

The reviewer didn’t mention low memory issues or spend more then a few minutes playing with Bluetooth. All in all, his take seems to be that the hardware is good, but PalmOS is getting long in the tooth and needs updated.

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First opinions of Halo 2

Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 11 Nov 2004 02:01:08 GMT

I ended up driving to Costco yesterday and picking up a copy of Halo 2, since my Amazon order is so screwed up. I haven’t had a ton of time to play with it, but I like what I’ve seen so far. The graphics are much more detailed, the vehicles feel better, and the multiplayer settings are way more advanced. I’ve made it through a couple levels in the single-player campaign, and played a couple multiplayer rounds with family members, and the whole game just feels more polished then the original Halo. Nice work, guys.

I’m planning on spending most of Saturday playing; hopefully I’ll still have the same opinion then.

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Spent the weekend in Portland

Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 13 Sep 2004 18:06:46 GMT

My in-laws offered to watch the children for the weekend, so Cynthia and I were able to spend Friday and Saturday nights in Portland. It was nice to have a break. We haven’t spent any time in Portland in almost two years, and we were surprised how much things have changed. The area around Powells has really been built up recently, with a bunch of upscale chain stores and restaurants, and (more importantly) lots of parking. Since Powells has always been cursed with a lack of parking (and a lack of space in general), the changes in the neighborhood definitely count as an improvement to me. Even if they *do* include a P.F. Changs.

We made it out of Powells this time for $100, possibly our cheapest trip ever. If you’ve been there, then you’ll know what I mean.

I’m currently reading a copy of Altered Carbon that I picked up at Powells. It’s going well so far, but I’m not convinced that it’ll make it through to the end.

Read more...

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Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 19 Jul 2004 05:54:38 GMT

I’ve enjoyed Christopher Moore’s books for years, starting with The Island of the Sequined Love Nun, which I bought largely because of the title and an Amazon recommendation. Since then, I’ve bought all of his other books and enjoyed all of them, although Lamb was frequently aggravating, but at least thought provoking.

So I was happy to receive a copy of his latest in the mail: Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings as a gift from my sister. The first half of the book is as enjoyable as anything he’s written, but it all kind of came apart at the end. In retrospect, I would have enjoyed the book more if he’d just stopped 2/3 of the way in, even with the gaping unresolved plot holes. The last few chapters required way too much suspension of disbelief, and even once that was achieved, I had a hard time following what was supposed to be happening.

The book tells the story of Nathan Quinn, a humpback whale researcher in Maui. He’s spent most of his life studying the humpback’s song, trying to find meaning in their slowly changing notes. Every spring, the humpbacks (megaptera novaeangliae, or roughly “the great wing of new england”–hence the “winged whale” in the title) return to Maui to calve, swimming thousands of miles and spending months at a time without food. There are a number of mysteries about the humpback’s song–why do only the males sing, who are they singing to (other males in Maui? Whales on the other end of the ocean?), why do the whales all sing the same basic song every year?

Fortunately or unfortunately, the book answers the question, but only in the very end, after a rollercoaster ride across the pacific. Before the ride began, we got to meet a great cast of characters, like Kona, their white rasta hawaiian native jewish boat washer from New Jersey–even he couldn’t keep track of which accent he was supposed to be using half of the time. The story was moving right along until the author decided to pull out the “magic happens here” card and the entire book disintegrated into a pile of stinking whale vomit. Which is a shame, because it was a great book right up to that point.

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Iron Sunrise

Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 19 Jul 2004 05:29:00 GMT

I read Charlie Stross’s Iron Sunrise over the weekend. It’s a sequel to Singularity Sky, which I reviewed briefly when it came out. I enjoyed Singularity Sky, but I didn’t feel that it was that strong of a book; it had some interesting ideas, and a couple of the characters were memorable, but it didn’t completely work for me. I probably would have been happier buying the paperback, frankly.

Iron Sunrise resurrects the two or three most memorable characters from Singularity Sky and sends them, plus a handful of new characters, on a quest to stop someone from killing two planets. The main character is a covert UN “black chamber” weapons inspector in a world where there are too many people with too many fun toys. The big problem isn’t nutcases who build nukes in their kitchen (although cheap heavy elements and home nanofabs are a bad mix); the real problem tends to come from authoritarian institutions who are willing to get in a fight with something that introduces itself as “I am not your god” and novas the stars of people who step too far outside the lines.

I really enjoyed Iron Sunrise much more then Singularity Sky, although I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much if I hadn’t read the previous novel first. There were a number of situations in Iron that echoed similar situations in Singularity, but played off the similarity towards interesting goals. Basically, I found it to be well written with interesting characters, plots, and gizmos. Just the thing for a summer weekend. There were a couple points in the book where it felt a little too 2004, and a few other points where it felt like we were hearing some of Stross’s website rants all over again (like the panopticon bit), but none of it really detracted from my enjoyment of the story. All in all, it’s one of the top books that I’ve read this year (along with his earlier Atrocity Archives).

Still, as good as his novels are becoming, his short stories tend to be even better. Go read ”Lobsters” online some time for an example.

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Light Reading: The Confusion and The Atrocity Archives

Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 26 Apr 2004 17:29:16 GMT

I finished two books this weekend: Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion and Charlie Stross’s The Atrocity Archives.

First, The Confusion. I’ve been a Neal Stephenson fan since college, when I first read Snow Crash. The Confusion is the third book in his latest set, following Cryptonomicon and Quicksilver, and continues on where Quicksilver left off, following the Waterhouses and Shaftoes from around 1690 to 1702. Like his previous two books, The Confusion is largely the tale of money and finance, and how our current financial system came about. It’s also a fascinating tale of English and French history, and occasionally filled with swashbuckling pirates. It was an enjoyable read, but it was also a long, dense book, and it ended with a totally unexpected twist. Once the fourth volume, The System of the World comes out in September, the entire set will stretch from the 1660s to the present day and cover over 3,500 pages. They’re good books, but you’ll want to block out a month or two to read them all, and then re-read them to figure out what the heck was going on the whole time.

The Atrocity Archives is a bit different–it’s set in the modern era, and the main story is only 178 pages long, although there’s an excellent novella tacked on at the end the carries the characters on a bit further. In Hollywood-speak, it’s probably best described as H.P. Lovecraft meets Simon Travaglia. It’s basically a spy story. Our hero works for The Laundry, a branch of the British government charged with suppressing dangerous knowledge and preventing disasters. In the world of the novel, there are things that go bump in the night, and the right incantation (or the right software) can trigger things that science is still laboring (in secret) to understand. If you’ve seen Hellboy or any of a thousand similar movies, then you understand the setting. The really enjoyable part of The Atrocity Archives is the story itself and the writing. I’d highly recommend picking up a copy. You may also wish to read A Colder War, one of the author’s short stories, although the short story is a lot creepier and less enjoyable then the novel.

Update: Found an excerpt.

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A Place So Foreign and Eight More

Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 09 Feb 2004 10:24:19 GMT

I finished reading Cory Doctrow’s A Place So Foreign and Eight More over the weekend. It’s a collection of (surprise) 9 of his short stories. I wasn’t very impressed with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom when I read it a month or so ago, but A Place So Foreign was much more enjoyable. I’ve really been enjoying science fiction short stories more then novels recently.

I didn’t mention it at the time, but I finished Charlie Stross’s Singularity Sky a few weeks back. I enjoyed it more then Down and Out, but less then A Place So Foreign. He has a collection of short stories out, so I’ll try to grab those next.

My current read is Lamb by Christopher Moore. I loved Island of the Sequined Love Nun (possibly the best title of any book ever), along with most of his other books, so we’ll see how this one goes.

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