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Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin Issue # 2010-02c
Hiking up a short next week's news briefs
In this issue:
Help for your build... How Antec's cool when heat isn't... Fixmo
preps 3/17 launch of BlackBerry oops antidotes... Franklin vs.
Gomer... Alcohol & the family... Protecting your Easter finest...
Special Report: power flexibility... Project Yippie: Blizzard
Belt blackout protection... Reviews: Atom noisemaker solution,
SmartSwipe, Orbit USB speaker & Casper 6 on WWS... plus our
commentary on the BYO niche
Doing a new high-power system-build? Let us help
Without saying whose, we know a still-secret part is on its way
to many of you to put through its paces. Even if you just swap
new for old you still have to yank the motherboard (some of you
may want a newer one). At that point, you may as well move it all
to a new case - especially if it's a quieter, cooler,
easier-to-work-with case than you have now. We arranged with
Antec to kit up a really sweet case, a very appropriate PSU, some
optional fans & some other goodies - just drop Marty a note to
say you'd like that. If you need anything else - motherboard,
memory or whatever - say so & Marty will exercise his other
connections on your behalf.
When hot isn't cool, Antec is
Have this embroidered: the hotter it gets, the sooner it fails.
We're talking about computer components here but we're also
talking about helping those people you reach find ways to delay
the day they have to replace what they already own; yes, the same
principles apply to the systems that emerge from people who build
their own. Antec cases are built to encourage airflow even
without fans, build in (as well as often having ready places to
add on) case fans that can move a lot of air without making a lot
of noise & in some cases even separate the chamber where the
power supply goes. Antec power supplies alter their fan speeds
from slow & quiet to fast & furious in response to how hot they
get as loads increase (which is why we recommend always choosing
to over-spec a PSU because that delays the point where any given
load will make it work that hard). Antec case fans, CPU coolers
(check out their new Kuhler line) & other specialty coolers are
legendary for their effectiveness (plus, in some models, some
very cool lighting effects). We should add there's nothing
hush-hush about their advances in reducing noise at the same time
as they shun heat, including accessories like fan & PSU gaskets.
The stores' strong selling season for BYO products runs through
April, so now is a great time to get Veronica to run you through
what's cool about Antec. Contact: Veronica Feldmeier, Antec Inc.
(Fremont, CA) 510-770-2150 vfeldmeier@antec.com
http://antec.com
Fixmo preps for 3/17 launch of BlackBerry oops antidotes
Some of you know Rick Segal, late a VC at JLA Ventures &
BlackBerry Partners Fund; his new Fixmo brand is building a bunch
of very sweet utilities for mobile phones. The first of these
launches (first for BlackBerry, with other platforms in the
works) on March 17 with a collection of oops antidotes. We'll
start sharing details on Fixmo Tools ($19.95) in our next issue.
For those old enough to remember Norton, undelete finally becomes
a BB option. If you can reach Rick, he can tell you more; if you
can't, Marty can get you a Sneak Preview copy. Contact: Rick
Segal, Fixmo (Toronto, ON) 416-414-9726 rick@Fixmo.com
http://Fixmo.com
Franklin & the Gomer antidote
Do you happen to remember how Gomer Pyle pronounced "suave &
debonair"? He's not the only one prone to gaffes when pronouncing
words you often read but seldom hear. The antidote for that is a
Franklin SCD-2100 Merriam Webster's Speaking Collegiate
Dictionary 11th Edition (street $95). It also addresses the flip
side for words you've heard but don't remember seeing through its
phonetic spelling correction. If English isn't your first
language, its guide is also available in Spanish, French, German
& Italian. Print or broadcast, college or real life, there are
enough clever helpers here to make it worth a quick review; ask
Aline. Contact: Aline Boutin, Franklin Electronic Publishers
(Burlington, NJ) 609-386-2500x4434 aline_boutin@franklin.com
http://franklin.com
Alcohol & the family
We want to shatter the misconception that true alcoholics use
blood alcohol monitors to help them get away with hiding their
addiction. A consumer breathalyzer (like any BACtrack model) is
their way to prove that they're standing strong in their battle
to beat alcoholism; it can also be their own wake-up call to how
much alcohol is in them when they thought they knew their limits.
We'll soon surprise you with an expert who will be saying that
this is the kind of device every family should have. You may not
think this is a consumer product category yet; check the shelves
at Kmart, Pep Boys & OfficeMax among others. Ask Keith to send
you one just so you can be familiar with it (ask for a fuel cell
model if you have diabetes). Booze may not be news, but new
consumer tech ways of coping for those who abuse just could be.
Contact: Keith Nothacker, KHN SOLUTIONS (San Francisco CA)
415-693-9756x113 mailto:keith.nothacker@bactrack.com
http://bactrack.com
Protecting your Easter finest
The photographer's will snap us, but only after they unsnap their
gear from the protective encasement of a Domke bag. For most
consumer cameras, even the smallest Domke bags offer rugged
protection against drops, splashes & other hazards; you'll be
surprised by how much they go beyond your expectations for a
camera bag. Ask Hilary for info & pix of some of these smaller
bags; review samples are available, too. Contact: Hilary Araujo,
Tiffen Company (Hauppauge, NY) 631-609-3216 haraujo@tiffen.com
http:/.tiffen.com
Special Report: Power flexibility
Our focus here is computers. About 70% of new purchases these
days are notebooks & about 70% of those spend time away from a
power outlet. You might assume that's enough to compel a priority
on designing them to use less power but end users are still stuck
with trade-offs between runtime, performance & battery weight.
For those that do plug in, is there any real advantage (beyond a
Green passion for the planet) to reducing power consumption? One
of the less obvious answers is that less power consumption tends
to translate into less heat production, meaning both a longer
life expectancy for components & more tangibly, less fan noise. A
less obvious outcome is that the lower the power needs, the
longer a given-capacity backup system can keep it alive in the
event of a power failure. Newer processors deliver more
horsepower with less mains power; newer architectures require
fewer total electronic "beds" (motherboard, slot cards, etc.) in
a system. Hard drives are becoming more efficient & using less
power; SSD alternatives cut that even more. Large memory
footprints consume their most power at boot time as data writes
to them, but by reducing disk swapping they add overall power
efficiency to the list of other attributes (speed, stability,
etc.) they bring to a system. We are not fans of rating a
system's power supply unit close to its boot-time power needs; we
prefer to over-spec the PSU to help it run cooler & quieter; the
overall loss in its efficiency at more modest levels of capacity
is fairly trivial compared to other considerations & when the
system ultimately needs an expansion, we'd rather not have to
replace a PSU. Lots of things contribute to a computer's overall
meter-spin, but when it's appropriate to design or configure for
lower power consumption, the biggest gains are its losses - in
heat & noise.
Project Yippie: Blizzard Belt blackout protection
Power reliability is never a sure thing, but our location
compromises it distressingly often. Part of that is because we're
well outside city limits, in the exurban countryside of maple
sugar hills, where overhead utility wiring is de rigueur; part of
that is because we're in the Blizzard Belt where ice on trees can
bring wires down & where ice on roads can result in drivers
bringing poles down. We've dealt with outages as long as 3-4 days
over the past couple of decades, but like most locations, most
outages last only a few seconds, some a few minutes, occasional
ones a few hours. It would be nice to be immune to these
vagaries, but it would be enormously expensive; if our goal here
is to think in the context of a very small business, we need to
think about very practical trade-offs. There was a time when we
would never suggest anything other than continuous online power
protection because in that era, few computer power supplies could
leap even a small gap in power availability & most standby power
backups took too long to kick in to let a computer keep running.
Continuous online systems are pricy, constantly consume power &
constantly produce noise. We checked the specs on our
off-the-shelf PSU for Yippie: it can sustain a 17msec
interruption with no ill consequence; the CyberPower
line-interactive (not just standby - it also kicks in when line
Voltage dips to brownout or climbs should utility transformers
fail) products respond within 4msec. Such systems are absolutely
quiet when they're not providing power or addressing the needs of
a depleted battery, which in a very small business makes for a
more polite workplace companion. We deliberately chose a capacity
significantly greater than our server's power needs for a reason
that many people today don't understand. The true capacity of any
battery-powered source is measured in both power (Watts or
Volt-Amperes) & time. The ratings on the retail boxes & Web pages
of most such devices tend to emphasize the power side of that,
rating the unit for how much power it can deliver as a system
takes 3-4 minutes to shut down. Our priority is to keep a system
up as long as possible & a higher rating for power that's gone in
3-4 minutes translates (pretty linearly) to a longer runtime when
feeding less power. The 1200VA unit we chose is close to tenfold
the power our server consumes, which gives us a reasonable way to
cope with outages up to an hour or so. After that, by choice,
we're simply off the air.
Special Report Bonus Review: Evercool chipset fan
This is really more about the Intel Atom kit, a widespread
problem it has & a fix we found for it. The Atom itself runs
coolly, but the kit uses both fins & fans to cool its Northbridge
chipset. The 40x40x10mm fan mounted there has a habit (from what
we read on the Web) of getting noisy - some right away, some
after use. When that happened here on Judie's PC, we got in an
Evercool EC4010M12CA ball-bearing 5000rpm fan, which fit the same
frame with the same screws & plugged into the same header as the
OEM fan but runs much more quietly. Its package includes its own
set of 4 screws plus a short 4-pin Molex male to female (inside
computer power connector) extension adapter with a male 3-pin
header tap so this fan can work even in installations that don't
have a motherboard header available. It is very nearly silent;
their best choice in this range (EC4010LL12B) has 2 ball
bearings, a slightly longer life expectancy (50000 vs. 35000
hours), a slower speed (4000rpm vs. 5000 rpm) & noise at <17dBA
(vs. <21dBA ). Bottom line: Evercool 40x40x10mm fans offer easy,
reliable, quiet replacements for the problem-prone chipset
coolers on Intel Atom boards.
Special Report Bonus Review 2: SmartSwipe
Every time we swipe a card at a store checkout line, we wonder if
there might be some cool way we could use that reader at the
desktop. That's why we asked for SmartSwipe for review & we have
to say it's pretty cool. The hardware is a small, black
egg-shaped USB swipe reader on a desk stand; the driver &
software come via download (not in the box) & add a toolbar to
the browser. On a Web page that asks for a credit card, you don't
type, you swipe, dodging any keystroke loggers your PC may be
suffering. The scanner encrypts the data, skips the keyboard
buffer & prepares it for the Web page - as displayed just below
the SmartSwipe button - with a double-check of which data goes
into which field as you hover your cursor above it. The card
number, name, expiration date & authentication code (which you
type in, but to the SmartSwipe interface & not the Web page) get
reintegrated when the page submits, but by that point, it's out
of reach of the keystroke loggers. We had some brief negative
feelings about this because while we first installed it, we had
to interrupt our tests to deal with other urgent issues involving
online info & every time we opened the browser, we had to douse a
SmartSwipe pop-up; that went away once we completed installation
& told it yeah, we get it. Bottom line: even if we have the most
malware-protected, keystroke-logger-free PC ever, we love the
idea that we don't have to squint at the worn card & type all
those numbers by hand any more - we'd rather swipe than type -
which means for us, all that extra security is just a bonus.
Special Report Bonus Review 3: Altec Lansing Orbit USB
When we listened to the new Altec Lansing Orbit USB speaker it
was hard to believe that this is the same company that produces
the exquisite A7 speakers; of course, the Orbit costs almost
$5800 less. The Orbit has what an audio pro would diplomatically
call a lot of "cut", meaning a decided emphasis on higher
frequencies, as you might expect for something with so small a
driver; audio purists will want to point the speaker away to
point those highs away from their axis of hearing. Admittedly,
this isn't intended as an audiophile product; it's all about
being convenient, small & loud. It needs no batteries because USB
provides both its power & its digital audio system connection.
It's made for portability with a fold-away kickstand, a
wrap-around, tuck-away USB cable & a bundled carrying case.
Bottom line: the Altec Lansing Orbit USB speaker is ready to go
where you go & pump out music loud enough & edgy enough to cut
through noisy backgrounds.
Special Report Bonus Review 4: Casper 6 on WWS
We had come to trust Casper 6 on our Big-I-7 desktop system for
its ability to create an asynchronous mirror dead-on Doppelganger
image of our volume c: "Main" RAID1 array to our volume d:
"Backup" drive every night. Its advanced features deal with open
files & to somehow only traffic changes in the drive since the
last overnight session. Naturally we wanted to use that same
approach on our Project Yippie server but ran (temporarily) into
one of Casper's rare limitations. Until our hardware RAID
controller gets here, the Main RAID 1 array on Yippie is software
mirrored using Microsoft's dynamic disk topology. Windows Web
Server 2008 R2 installs a second 100MB partition on that main
drive ("for system purposes") & lets the rest of the drive serve
as the Main volume. When it comes to imaging a whole drive,
Casper can only do that for Basic (not Dynamic) drives;
meanwhile, it has no problem keeping all but that 100MB up to
date on our Backup drive. Once our hardware RAID controller
arrives, we'll stop the software mirror on the first 2 drives,
revert them both from Dynamic to Basic, re-mirror them through
the hardware, then configure Casper to truly image the entire
drive. Bottom line: we can confirm that Casper works reliably in
a Windows Server 2008 R2 environment & credit it for finding a
way to provide the data redundancy we seek even when our own
configuration screw-ups prevent it from doing so completely -
recommended.
The BYO niche
Since November, we've been catching up with our connections &
making new ones at companies making products for people who build
their own computers. Many of them are marketing without course
corrections; for example, category-wide almost all marketing
dollars are spent pursuing "performance-intensive users" - a
descriptor that might be useful if they didn't only use it as a
code phrase for gamers. We hang around BYO departments to keep an
eye on what people are picking up off the shelves, we eavesdrop
on some of their conversations with each other & with the sales
staff & sometimes we'll engage them in brief chats. On the
higher-horsepower side a lot of the system builds are about disk
arrays, a lot about HD video editing & some about being able to
do more things at once; the biggest differences between their
systems & the ones the gamers buy are fewer graphics cards, fewer
glowing or twinkling lights & less garish cases. There are also
buyers (you may want to pursue this as a story seed) who put
together more nominal systems because they don't like the
off-the-shelf branded choices (frequent touch points are memory,
the need to swap power supplies to add to a system & various
vulgar descriptions of bundled wares). Contact: Martin Winston,
Newstips (Novelty, OH) 440-338-8400; marty@Newstips.com
http://Newstips.com
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Newstips Bulletin [Novelty, OH] +1.440.338.8400 http://Newstips.com
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