geeky

i bought a sirius satellite radio. local radio is pretty good, but the content on sirius is suprisingly good.

purchasing it for home, i wasn’t particularly excited about any of the off-the-shelf offerings for tuners. none of them fit with my pc-centric entertainment. i vaguely remembered something about a company called “timetrax” that was doing pvr/tivo-style software for sirius and xm. i looked them up and found that they produce both software and hardware. so… i bought a full “kit” from them including everything needed.

their hardware is a small black box about 2 inches by 2 inches and maybe 1.5 inches tall. it is a usb device, powered by a 12vdc 2 amp wall-wart transformer with an 1/8 inch mini-phono audio out. the usb, audio, and power are on one side of the box with the opposing side housing a 14-pin block molex looking connector. it’s designed to plug into a car tuner, in place of the “sirius connect” adapter.

typically, one purchases a car tuner for use with a given (in-dash) head unit. sirius manufactures one tuner and adapters for jvc, kenwood, and alpine. the tuner and adapter mate at the 14 pin connector with metal flanges and screws to secure the two pieces together. timetrax takes the place of the adapter and presents a usb interface (actually, rs232 over usb) to their software. this allows them to change channels and pull information off the tuner, just like an in-dash car stereo does (artist/track info is displayed on most head units). pretty clever.

their software called “timetrax recast” works for both the sirius and xm flavors of their hardware. it presents a fairly simplistic ui with everything you’d expect from a radio (signal strength, channel info including chan. name and genre, artist, track title, “presets”, etc.). the software begins buffering a song when the track info changes and “records” an mp3 or wav either when you hit “record” or based on your white/black lists (“record this song anytime it’s on” or “record everything except this song”). id3 tags are stamped into the mp3 and the tracks are organized based on user-defined preferences for directory names and structure.

the hardware’s fine, though the plastic case isn’t secured to the tuner, at all. the software is complete and utter crap. it’s needlessly show and cumbersome, it hangs, and the recording mechanism creates big hierarchies of empty directories.

it is remarkably cool to stream music off the satellite to work via shoutcast at higher quality that sirius’ online stuff.

more about my impressions of the sirius service, itself, later. i’ve also discovered an excellent alternative to timetrax; again, more later. now? i have to do laundry.

since
i dropped mt-blacklist in, i feel much less of an urge to buy viagra.

not too bad for just under 3 weeks.

nicole and i bought ourselves a “big-ass photo printer” for christmas. i spent some time looking for one that met our requiremnts.

• printer manufacturer must produce acid-free ink and photo paper for said printer. (nicole scrapbooks and this is important for “lasting memories” or something)

• printer must print b&w text on letter sized paper pretty quickly.
• printer must accept different ink tanks for each color (no “oh shit, this one’s almost out of red, we should use it for swimming pool pics only”).
• printer must do usb and firewire; usb 2.0 optional.
• printer must be produced by major name manufacturer (i once had a tektronix phazer something or other SCSI printer that i couldn’t get drivers for without a $14K/year contract. i can only imagine trying to find a longhorn driver for ‘billy joe jim bob’s pretty good photo printer’).
• printer paper and ink must be comperable in price to other major manufacturers’ paper and ink. ($.29 to $.34/page)

the canon i9900 came close to meeting all of these. canon doesn’t sell acid-free ink in all 8 colors required for photo printing, but 3rd parties do.

it’s a big ass printer. i was immediately suprised by it’s size when i opened the box. the picture above shows it printing an A3+ sized photo. A3+ is 13×19 inches and i must have visually scaled the image to match an 8.5×11 inch letter paper.

i’m impressed with the quality of the photo printing. it produced solid vibrant colors that are true to the image; my laptop screen isn’t. the paper is realllly nice. i got some 9.6mil “pro” glossy 4×6 photo paper and it’s easily the heaviest paper i’ve ever had any of my pictures on (including some pretty pricey 35mm kodachrome negative slide-to-print work i had done). i printed on the back of some 8×10 pro matte paper and it looked like shit; same image, same paper, other side? looked great.

i printed a couple calendars for celeste on 12×18 construction paper, mostly for the novelty of printing big. looked amazing.

i hate canon’s driver packaging, but that’s an infrequent pain. “Easy PhotoPrint” is an app that was bundled. it has rudimentary red eye/crop/resize type editting functions, but largely is useful for it’s knowledge of the printer’s geometry. the driver does include a really cool visualization of the amount of ink left in each tank.

overall i’m really happy. amazon has it for $409 with free shipping, right now.

omar posted about a very cool app in beta by microsoft (via the GIANT acquisition) for combatting spyware.

as someone who’s reasonably savvy when it comes to keeping ie from accepting stuff it shouldn’t, i didn’t expect it to find anything. previous, even somewhat recent, runs of lavasoft’s ad-aware had only turned up doubleclick cookies and a few smaller names in the same type of business; hardly suprising. “microsoft windows antispyware”, frighteningly enough, found “myway” on my machine. note that the bho wasn’t active nor was i able to find any open handles or fingerprints anywhere indicating that it was actually a problem for me.

a few complaints, though. the ui is completely distinct from any other windows app i use. the main window is modeless but minimizes a ‘tree’ off to an unobtrusive tab on the left. note that i actually like the ui, just didn’t adjust quickly. i’m sure this is a remnant of it being an a completely different dev team.

overall, it looks to be a pretty comprehensive set of checkpoints with a pretty decent user-facing bit.