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Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin Issue # 2009-06a
Weather or not there's news
Vibe pilot production runs this month
The first few TuneBug Vibe units get a pilot production run this
month, which will be the first time anybody can know for sure how
great it looks & it sounds. Barring major problems, main
production runs start in August. It's a novel enough device to
warrant attention, with the plus of being a lot more hygienic
than anything you keep pulling in & out of your ear. Dick can get
you info & Marty can get you considered for first looks soon (in
June, if it can carry a tune) & cusp-of-retail stories in late
August or early September. Contact: Dick Brown, Silicon Valley
Global (San Jose CA) 408-497-6403 dbrown@sv-global.com
http://tunebug.com
Thermaltake quakes Computex
In case you didn't make it to Taipei for Computex here's a quick
skim of what's new & coming (some very soon, some a few months
out) from Thermaltake. There are some new offerings in the really
cool Element case series (both of our Core i-7 project PCs ended
up in Element S cases), including a G series for gamers with a
top-front fan speed control & some color-shifting case lights.
The new DuOrb Extreme CPU Cooler Frio is an aluminum wonder that
will even support the upcoming 32nm Intel Socket 1156 CPUs (which
the Thermaltake SpinQ already supports). Their newest power
supply design is the ToughPower Grand with metal mesh over the
cooling fan to allow air passage while making it easier to block
dust. There's also a very cool (pun accidental) twin-fan V320
ISGC cooler for graphics cards. Ramsom can get you pix & details.
Contact: Ramsom Koay, Thermaltake Technology USA (City of
Industry, CA) 626-968-9189x127 ramsom.koay@thermaltakeusa.com
http://ThermaltakeUSA.com
Snap into this shortcut
Take any photo of yourself & e-mail it to Hilary; he'll send back
a few adaptations of your photo that Tiffen Cool fx & Photo fx
(each $2.99 in the App Store) on an iPhone or iPod Touch can do.
Since covering indulgences is not your first priority these days,
think of this in terms of how to get better pictures without
needing to buy a better camera. We should add, this also
demonstrates that the software works with any photo in either
device, whether or not that device took the photo. Contact:
Hilary Araujo, Tiffen Company (Hauppauge, NY) 631-273-2500x1216
haraujo@tiffen.com http:/.tiffen.com
What's in the cards for your cameras
Winston says you never fail to outgrow your stuff, but that's not
cause for a scare when PNY is there on almost every store shelf
with big, new camera memory cards that give you room to take more
pictures without needing to delete other shots to make room. With
last season's slowdown in replacement camera purchases, more of
those people you reach are nearing empty in terms of available
free space on their camera memory cards. Speaking of photos: if
you need images of the range of PNY cards for your coverage, or
if you need one to a few to review, ask Sue. Contact: Susan
Bartolucci, PNY (Parsippany, NJ) 973-560-5592 sbartolucci@pny.com
http://PNY.com
Special Report: Gaming crossover
It is, believe it or not, only a coincidence that this report
runs coincident with E3; we're dealing here with the results of
investigations we began in January, as well as in the traditional
context of segmentation among products for different segments of
computer users. What we're seeing, in short, is a transformation
in the buyer population for the products that used to be things
that only a budget-agnostic gamer would buy, let alone want.
Traditionally, extremely high horsepower for graphics cards was
all about drawing more polygons faster to make the synthetic
gaming world more detailed & snappier; recently, business users
have been plunging headlong into the same products to drive
higher resolutions on multiple displays at higher frame rates. We
know that the fast-growing interest in HD video editing as a
business application is part of that, but not enough to account
for the more wholesale shifts we're seeing. In hard drives, it's
no surprise to see everybody interested in capacity, but it's
much more remarkable to see the intensity of their interest in
speed (faster spindles & solid state drives have been asked-about
items for some time, with a growing interest in RAID arrays).
Like gamers, more mainstream customers who choose desktop systems
are now either building their own or dealing with brands (like
Velocity Micro) that specialize in custom configurations. Gamers
no longer represent the only shoppers interested in precision
mice or lighted keyboards or bigger sound systems. Apply your own
methodology to noting or confirming these trends; we're confident
in ours, but don't want to impose our conclusions on your own
investigations. We are often guilty of characterizing gamers as
people who can afford to spend money on hardware that they're not
spending on personal hygiene or romantic interests; we may now
have to treat them as part of a growing class of high-performance
system buyers. As we see today's user base shaping up, the
largest segment seems to be Windows on off-the shelf notebooks,
followed by off-the-shelf Windows desktops, followed by
high-performance Windows desktops, followed by Mac users,
followed by open source. While we (as you) have to concentrate a
lot of our coverage on that biggest top slice, we all recognize
the special role being played by the people who are driving
change. Only now, fewer of them are malodorous.
I7 project: Running, but not without stumbles
The better of our two Core-i7 systems is now running as the
production machine on which this report is being prepared; the
lesser system is temporarily stuck in a loading limbo that we
hope to soon resolve. We had the "Big" system up & running
smoothly, ready for migration, only to discover that Windows Easy
Transfer didn't live up to its name. We tried transferring over
the LAN - twice - 16 hours each time - then failure. The third
time, we used an eSATA drive & after about 3 hours in each
direction, everything seemed more or less ready. That is to say,
the favorites & files & applications were all in place, but most
of them refused to run. Part of the problem was with Windows
OneCare; though set to ask for permission for first access, it
just blocked & never offered any option. We uninstalled it &
reinstalled it. We methodically added every application
executable to its allowed list, manually. We checked Device
Manager for driver problems; the only one was a "USB Hub" (turned
out to be a combo hub & card reader that needed a Realtek driver.
That was about 6 more hours - not bad in this context. Then,
because we had changed so much, we rebooted to let all the
updates get a toe-hold. The animated bar turned into a black
screen that stayed black, even minutes after the HD activity LED
stopped throbbing. Oh, well - black screen, probably a graphics
driver - we rebooted & chose to let it start at a lower VGA
resolution. It stalled again at black. We tried safe mode with
networking (stalled at black), last known good configuration
(stalled) & even pure safe mode (stalled). It was time to reach
for the Vista DVD and let it spend an hour figuring out that it
didn't know what was wrong, making the only choice to let it
revert to the last successful launch's configuration. Even more
things were askew this time, but we were done being gentle. We
went in under the Administrative Tools & explicitly assigned just
about every permission or authority that could apply to any human
user to our user name. Things started getting better. OneCare
asked for its permissions. Programs launched & ran. Our e-mail
was intact (even the thousands of junk mail messages that arrived
over the weekend). We generated & associated new digital
certificates to our VBA applications in Access & Word that let us
publish these issues every week. And we're slowly but
methodically getting our fingerprint software to learn all our
logins. We'll try getting some video cobbled together this
weekend so we can focus on the performance aspects of this
machine; today, our hopes for them are a lot more optimistic than
they were yesterday.
Special Report Bonus Review: NetObjects Fusion 11
We've been using more than half of the previous versions of
NetObjects Fusion, so it made sense to upgrade to version 11;
we're about 6 months behind the world on that (which is
consistent with not doing much upkeep on our Web sites for the
past 6 months). The new version has a bunch of new features we
probably won't get around to using, like a new timeline editor
that animates (grow. slide, reveal, etc.) elements of a Web page;
it sounds like a very cool approach to FAQ pages. The image
gallery is handier than ever, even allowing simple editing &
resizing from within. It now builds in an automatic Google
Analytic code generator & a sitemap for submission to Google. For
more intense site builders, it has a ton of new database tools,
graphing, calendars, integration & other big-league toolbox stuff
- it's more than we use for our simple brochureware sites, but
there for people who never want to hit a low ceiling. For us,
Fusion was the first WYSIWYG solution that felt as easy as
building a Word page when we needed to cobble together a Web
site. We've evolved a little since then; they've evolved tons.
Bottom line: NetObjects Fusion 11 lets you start easy & stay easy
when creating & maintaining as stunning, innovative, interactive
& compelling a Web site as you can build, with all the more
intense bells & whistles that earmark this as much a package for
the pros as for dweebs like us.
Special Report Bonus Review 2: Contour ShuttleXpress
The squishy little half-a-flying-saucer shape is something over
4" in diameter & its rubber feet tenaciously maintain its
position on the desktop. The top side has 5 buttons along the
outer edge, a spring-loaded top ring that can move in either
direction & a top-center spinner knob with a fingertip indent in
it. This gizmo is the Contour Design ShuttleXpress, which we
asked to review when we learned it was configured to run with
Sony Vegas Pro. In that context, it's an extremely handy way to
advance (or reverse) your edit point as quickly as you want or a
frame at a time; even if that were its only use, we'd recommend
this wholeheartedly, but those darned overachievers have gone way
beyond that. In our office application, the browser, media player
or just about anything else, it automatically recognizes what
you're working with & adapts its functionality to suit. You know
what that means, right? Another set of learning & self-training
experiences until we reach a point of competence that fulfills
our goal of laziness. Every button, every motion, every twist of
the dial is configurable & you're free to add controls for
applications (or even games) they don't yet cover. Our own
desktop is now 4 devices across: fingerprint scanner, keyboard,
trackball & this gizmo. Bottom line: the Contour Design
ShuttleXpress is one of the handiest USB desktop human interfaces
we've encountered in years.
Special Report Bonus Review 3: MXL V69 mike
In the days before embedded processors, before integrated
circuits, before even transistors, the dominant active electronic
device on the planet was the vacuum tube. A filament would heat a
cathode into bubbling off electrons that would be attracted
(because of a relatively high bias Voltage) to an anode; between
them, a much smaller signal-level Voltage applied to a
screen-like grid acted like a valve (in England, vacuum tubes
were called electron valves) so that this small signal's
variations were mirrored in the much larger electron flow through
the anode. That's a long one-sentence explanation of how a triode
works & back when Boomers were kids, one of the most common
vacuum tubes was the 12AT7 dual triode, which populated a lot of
radio & TV sets. These days, a lot of those boomers' kids &
grandkids find something attractive in the faint sizzle that
accompanied audio in the vacuum tube era, making vacuum tube
microphones a very trendy item these days. MXL sent us their V69
condenser mike with a built-in 12AT7 preamplifier; well, the tube
is built in, but there's a brick of an external power supply
between the mike & whatever the XLR plugs into. The mike is a
handsome cylinder, about as big around & a little longer than
small salamis with a gold tone mesh cap covering its 25mm
condenser element. The mike exhibits good sensitivity & flatness
across the voice range (spoken or vocal), though it has a
high-midrange emphasis that can color some instrumental
recordings. It's actually fun to watch the reaction when somebody
with only digital experience touches the case of the mike; its
decidedly warm from the heat of the tube, which these younger
people often decide means there's something terribly wrong going
on inside that microphone. The mike comes in a foam-lined
aluminum carrying case, complete with power supply, cables,
windscreen & shock mount. We regard this as a mike we would bring
out only when its slightly warm audio personality is important,
mostly because the life expectancy for vacuum tubes is
significantly shorter than for solid state & it's been a very
long time since the corner drug store carried replacement tubes.
Bottom line: The MXL Mogami Edition V69 Tube Preamplified
Condenser Microphone combines a warm sound, a warm touch & hot
good looks into an excellent performance package that would be a
welcome addition to any vocal performer's audio portfolio.
Special Report Bonus Review 4: Seagate Showcase
We have a few TV shows we like to watch (though curiously, none
this week) but our schedule doesn't always agree with theirs, so
we use the cable box DVR to unlock the clock on those shows. We
also use it to keep a collection of half-hour shows we can pipe
to the treadmill (which has its own TV screen). Doing both was
getting a little uncomfortable as our available capacity after a
stern delete-what-you-can session started dropping to less than
30%. It took just a few minutes to turn 70% full to 7% full when
we plugged in a Seagate Showcase drive. The eSATA Seagate
Showcase mates with the eSATA connector on the back of this
Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300 cable box, plugs into an AC
outlet through an adapter brick & that's about all there is to
installation. In a few minutes, the cable box sees it & asks
whether to extend DVR storage to it; a little while after that,
the available-space stats start looking very hospitable indeed.
Seagate was even thoughtful enough to include a rear-panel
3-position selector for the brightness of its blue pilot light:
full, dim or off. Bottom line: the Seagate Showcase DVR storage
expander offers one of the simplest installations we can remember
& does its work effectively, politely & totally transparently;
very cool.
Special Report Bonus Review 5: VistaBootPro
We've collectively gone through dozens of system crashes without
ever losing more than a few minutes of work since we adopted the
practices of making our main drive a (RAID1) mirror & creating an
asynchronous mirror through nightly differential clones to
another drive, which is also bootable. Windows Vista is happy to
let you initially install it on two drives & give you a choice of
which to launch when you boot up a system. That's some choice; at
default, you get a list of (in our case) two entries with exactly
the same name. The Boot tab in System Configuration (under
Administrative Tools) lets you accomplish a very minor amount of
fiddling. A lot more is available from a command prompt using the
BCDEDIT command, which is a lot like casting spells when you're
not sure if you remember all the right words. In DOS it's screwy,
but we found a GUI approach we like a lot. VistaBootPro lets us
rename those boot choices (we use "Vista 64 (Main)" & "Vista 64
(Backup)" but you could use Bert & Ernie or Jekyll & Hyde or Stan
& Ollie or Zeppo & Gummo). It lets us change the order in which
they appear, change the default choice, change the delay before
launching the default choice (we dropped that from 30 seconds to
10) & even change the boot drive for the OS. It lets you back up
& restore the BCD registry & accomplish a ton of tweaking. It
works with Vista & legacy (mostly XP) flavors of Windows & we
note there's a beta up that supports Windows 7. We find it saves
us time, spares us scowls & makes us feel a smidge safer. Bottom
line: anybody who ever has to install or restore more than one
copy of Windows on a machine will want VistaBootPro in their tool
kit.
Drinking the Kool-Ade on New Media
When's the last time you bought something because you saw it
mentioned in a tweet? Did anything on a Facebook page ever make
you run to a store to get something? Dare we ask about blogs?
Vendors spend money on PR programs because they ultimately want
to compel enough new purchases to have the profit margins more
than pay for the PR costs, but we don't know of any single
example of that happening as a result of new media. Blame the PR
agencies who need to count those places as placements; heaven
knows that only about one in three of reporters in traditional
media who was covering products a year ago is still doing that
today, so PR agency "scorecards" look pretty empty if they didn't
present those new media placements as worthy. There may be fewer
opportunities for product coverage in traditional media if you
think in terms of how that whole machine has traditionally
worked, but that's just PR laziness. We all still have coverage
to do & a good story is still a good story, whether or not a
product is involved; the challenge for vendors is that few PR
agencies understand those products well enough to discern what
that story might be. If you're feeling sympathetic toward any of
the vendors who are trying to pitch you, ask Marty for the PDF
for our new "Press Tectonics" briefing, satisfy yourself that
it's not a self-serving hard-sell pitch sheet for us & pass it on
to whatever extent you like. 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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