Saturday, December 29, 2012

The Christmas haul - or as I call it, "The Christmaul"

I don't want to seem materialistic, and really, I am not. I'm pretty happy with what I have, and during lean years, I go right about my business without complaint. And we have had some lean years.

But this year was actually pretty great. Best Christmas in a while!

I'll start with the big one. Let me first say that I love my wife. I still can't believe how lucky I am; I never think anything otherwise, at any time of year. But guys, you should all be jealous, because this Christmas my wife surprised me with this:


That's a brand new Gretsch 5422T. My first hollow body guitar. It sounds awesome, and very different from my Jazzmaster. (I still love the Jazzmaster, but I wanted to try something new.) To paraphrase A Christmas Story, it's indescribably beautiful! It is really just an amazingly constructed guitar. It plays a little different than I'm used to, but that's kind of the point.

I'd had a Gretsch 5122T on my Amazon wish list for a while, just as a pie in the sky thing, never expecting anyone to actually buy it. So I was quite taken aback when this showed up.

By the way, may I suggest that those of you hellbent on collecting guns for Christmas collect guitars instead? Make music, not war. What holiday do you think we're celebrating here?

Anyway, onward. Some of you may remember an old post I wrote on the "Made in England" Doc Martens. I was not impressed. Well, I gave them another shot - this was originally going to be my "big" Christmas present from my wife:


We usually pick out our own gifts. This was my pick (my old Docs have holes in them and they were having a sale), and the guitar was a surprise. I'm gonna have more on these later. Suffice to say they are quite a bit different from the MIE ones I got a few years ago. I think these are keepers.


My brother's family gave my wife and I an Amazon gift certificate to share, and my stepmother gave us money.  That actually turned out great, because my launch PlayStation 3 (which also happens to be our Blu-Ray/DVD player) gave me the dreaded Yellow Light of Death for the second time this week. I repaired it enough to get the disc stuck in it out and back up my save games, but after two repairs and probably 6 total hours of my time combined with the knowledge that it'll definitely happen again... well, we've got a new PS3 on the way. My wife suggested it! (Honestly, we've been trying to figure out what to do with last year's Christmas gift money ever since then, so this gave us some low-hanging fruit.)  Did I mention I have a great wife?


My mom gave me these books on Lincoln. I will read them - I like history, and we almost went to see the Spielberg film on Christmas day (went to Les Mis instead, just a scheduling thing. Disappointing, btw).  I've always had an interest in Lincoln, and my wife and I actually just visited his memorial in Washington, DC earlier this fall (I didn't write about that here, but have been meaning to).

Side note: my mom also gave my wife this Smithsonian-produced book on fashion, which, let's be honest, I'm probably glad she gave to my wife and not me, but it actually is an absolutely amazing book. It's literally the entire history of fashion by era, with tons of pics. If you ever wondered when powdered wigs went out of style, no doubt you will easily find the answer in this book - it's a massive, impressive reference.


My wife also gave me this. Such a wifey kind of gift, isn't it? The truth is I love this movie. It took me until well into adulthood to appreciate Audrey Hepburn, but I've acquired the taste for her now. I think my wife has kind of a girl crush on her too, though; she also bought me an Audrey Hepburn calendar, and I've always subscribed to the idea that people buy other people the gifts they want for themselves. She's always looking for Hepburn movies we haven't seen yet on Netflix.

I had a huge misconception about this movie until I was about 35, just based on stuff like, I dunno, the title, and maybe that cover photo there, which is blatant false advertising that's been going on since the movie's release. I understand it; make the beautiful lead actress even more beautiful and sell more tickets to the movie. But this is a movie about a poor southern girl pretending to be a wealthy socialite (in the book, she was even a call girl). It's about a confused, immature person learning her place in the world. It's sad and kind of gritty. It reminds me so much of some of the people I knew in college that it actually makes me nostalgic, even though I went to college in the 90's, not the 60's. It's totally timeless and real; there are people just like Holly Golightly walking around New York City right now. Like so many uniquely New York stories, it's not actually a fantasy. This movie happens, in real life, all the time. 

As a counterpoint to that, a movie that could probably never happen in real life:


My other Christmas present to myself. This is the disc that actually got stuck in my PS3. I'm obsessed with this movie. Rooney Mara is the new Naomi Watts and this is her Mulholland Drive.

If you have not seen The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, please fix that problem immediately. Yes, the American version is superior to the Swedish. I've seen both. I like Noomi Rapace alright (I liked her better in Prometheus)... but Rooney Mara just takes the character to a whole other level. She knew she had to give Americans more than just punk clothes and a bad attitude to make us believe she'd be so completely shunned by society. The borderline autism her Lisbeth seems to have just makes me like her more when she shows flashes of emotion. And she's just a complete fucking badass when she has to be. I want a Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander action figure.

I'm not always a huge fan of David Fincher's directing, but when he's on, he's on. And the source material here was just made for a director like him - somebody who's really good with dark subject matter, high attention to detail, very thoughtful and good with actors. With so much dialogue in this film by so many of the other characters, and so little from Lisbeth herself, it's really important to have an actors' director for a film like this.

Well, that was pretty much it, plus the stocking stuffers (which included Astronaut Ice Cream). I think I'm pretty set for a while, though!

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Don't call it a "phablet" - the Galaxy Note II

My phone could eat your phone for lunch and still have room for seconds.  My phone could beat up your phone.  My phone contains chunks of your phone in its stool. (That's a Phil Hartman reference, if you didn't get it.) This is the kind of thing that pops into my head every time I see my new Android 4.1-packing, 4G LTE-supporting, quad-core CPU-powered 5.5" Samsung Galaxy Note II next to literally any other phone out there. Well, except maybe the original Galaxy Note, which is actually bigger. This thing is a monster.


But don't call it a "phablet". Samsung doesn't, and that's because it isn't. It's a phone, and it works pretty much like any other phone... just bigger. It's Samsung's flagship phone, frankly, with a faster processor, bigger screen, newer OS and more features than their as-yet better-known and cheaper Galaxy S3.

To someone like me, with gorilla-sized hands and tarantula-like fingers, it feels like a phone should. As soon as I picked it up, I had a "where have you been all my life?" moment. Other phones have always felt tiny to me, and I've never understood how people could thumb-type on a touchscreen or do other things that smartphones supposedly let you do.

I can literally make a fist around my wife's iPhone 3GS

It looks like a keychain or something, right?

Now be honest - doesn't this look a little more natural?

If you're wondering why I'm comparing the Galaxy Note II to an ancient iPhone 3GS, it's just what I happened to have around. But let's remember, nobody thought the iPhone 3GS was "small" until bigger phones came along. Phones are getting bigger over time - pushed along by innovators like the Note II that are still on the bleeding edge of size.

Even my Epic 4G, which was pretty powerful by the standards of the day (it was a first-gen Galaxy S), was too small for me to really do much on it other than text and email... painfully. As a side note, I owned an iPhone 3GS for one day and returned it in part because it was literally impossible for me to type on legibly. I know I'm not the only one, or sites like Damn You Autocorrect wouldn't exist. The Epic 4G partially made up for being too small with its physical keyboard, which is why I bought it.

The Galaxy Note II ("GN2" from this point on) finally lets me do everything I've heard people could do on touchscreen-based smartphones. I can type! I can text! I can browse the web - almost without squinting! I can play twitch-type games and do all the other things. This is what a smartphone should be... if you've got big hands.

SCREEN SIZE, HARDWARE AND BATTERY LIFE
The 16:9 5.5" screen on this thing let me sell my Nexus 7 (I've kept my 10" Motorola Xoom, though). You can do 90% of what you can on a 7" screen in 5.5". The screen itself is beautiful, and at 1280x720 resolution - the same as the Nexus 7 but in a smaller size - I don't see any pixels at all at normal distance. It is a Super AMOLED screen, so it is capable of those exaggerated colors that the tech's known for, but the GN2 allows you to change settings for a much more accurate appearance that's very well calibrated. Menus and icons can definitely look dull on the natural or movie settings until you're used to it, though.

One thing, if you're deciding between a big phone or a small tablet - Android can specify two different UI's both for itself and its apps, and as a phone, the GN2 uses the phone interface. So unless you plan on hacking the thing, don't expect to run tablet apps or have a bunch of extra screen real estate out of the box. Everything looks like it does on pretty much every other Android phone... just bigger.

The hardware itself has a really solid feel despite being all plastic (and Gorilla Glass). Before you pooh-pooh plastic construction, take a look at this Samsung testing video, which includes plenty of disturbing shots of the GN2 getting robot butt-stabbed and peed on.


Now do you understand why plastic makes a good material for phones? You're not gonna see any shattered backs or scratched paint on the GN2 or other Samsung phones.

I do find it advisable to use a case for no reason other than the phone's slickness - this is the one real downside to its construction. The glossy plastic on both the back and sides gets greasy very quickly and it's incredibly easy to drop the phone. And one other quick note: initially the chrome trim on my phone didn't seem to sit flush against the screen, and I thought about returning it.  Then I watched a couple disassembly videos on YouTube to see how the phone's constructed, and that convinced me to just try pressing in on that bulge, hard. Almost immediately the chrome trim snapped into place. So clearly, my phone just wasn't put together quite right at the factory, but it was an easy fix. The phone frame's just held together with plastic tabs - it's a very easy phone to take completely apart and replace any broken part.

The GN2 does have a MicroSD memory card slot, common in Samsung phones but becoming less common in others - including Google's own Nexus line. That means you can do what I did and install a 64GB card for 80GB in total storage, for a true monster of a phone and real high definition video powerhouse. Only a few years ago, most laptops didn't come with that much storage, and I was salivating over a Japanese phone that supported 8GB. You can save more books and magazines to the phone than you'd ever need for a plane trip, and more HD movies than you'd ever need for a cross-country train trip. (And let's not forget those "private" videos that some people seem to like to carry around.) And I doubt you'd ever even need to worry about space available for photos or videos.


Yeah, 80GB becomes 70GB once you cut through the marketing-speak.

Speaking of the camera, a lot gets written about smartphone cameras these days and how they're replacing dedicated point and shoots. That may be true, but I personally still find basically all smartphone cameras to be crap. In bright light the GN2's performance is decent, but maybe it's just me... I find I shoot mostly in low light situations, because that's when the fun stuff happens. And in those situations, the tiny sensors on smartphones - including the GN2, iPhone 5 and others - just don't measure up. Too noisy, underexposed (to keep the gain at a minimum, I'm guessing), and too blurry as the image processor tries to reduce that noise by smoothing it out. Here's an unmolested low light photo from the GN2 that suffers from all of these problems in spades (click the image for the big version):


I'm going to keep carrying around my Nikon S8200 when I know I'll be taking snapshots, and my Canon Rebel T2i when I want something a bit more serious. This isn't an indictment of the GN2's camera, but all smartphones. They suck as cameras, even today, and are only worth even thinking about because a smartphone's a camera you'll always have with you.

The battery, on the other hand, is a huge and removable 3100mah, and while my Epic 4G was barely able to make it through a single day, I go to bed with this thing at around 75% every night - and I use it! You can never have "too much battery" and I actually hope the GN3 embiggens it further, but for now this is the best battery life this side of the Droid Razr MAXX (a phone you'd really only want for its battery life). Being removable, you can also carry as many spare batteries around as you want. Carry an infinite supply and you'll never have to charge!

S PEN
Aside from the screen size, the GN2's other big feature (pun intended) is the pressure-sensitive S pen that basically turns your phone into a small Wacom drawing pad. Apple intended with the iPhone to do away with styli, which up until that point were thought of as necessary for PDA data entry. I'll grant Apple that it's true, a stylus isn't necessary, but it is definitely useful, especially as Samsung's implemented it on the GN2. One of the things that I always wished my Epic 4G could do was let me just jot down a quick note. And sure, I could unlock the screen, open some sort of memo app, then type something out, but it always felt clunky and harder than just picking up a pen and writing something on the nearest piece of unopened junk mail. It was pen-less smartphone technology, as pioneered by Apple, that seemed archaic and inelegant, not the simpler pen and paper.

I love that the GN2 lets me pull out the S pen with the phone asleep and immediately scribble something on the screen - just as if I were using a real pen and paper. It knows when you take the pen out, and it can immediately open an S Note window (yes, a window!). If I use the S pen for nothing else, this feature was absolutely worth the price premium vs. competing phones.


Notice I don't touch any controls on the phone until I turn it off, which would happen automatically if I didn't do it manually. And yeah, unfortunately that is an accurate reflection of my handwriting.

SOFTWARE/BLOAT
My GN2's the Sprint version, and it does come with Sprint Zone, but I don't really see any other Sprint-specific apps. No NASCAR, at least. There is a whole suite of Samsung apps, most of which are not useful to me (many just duplicate Google Play services, but not as well), but they do have a "find my phone" feature if you sign up for a free Samsung account. Clearly, Samsung is trying to be the Apple of the Android world (though I'm not commenting on whether they've stolen any patents - even if they have, massive companies like Apple are not who the patent system is designed to protect). Unfortunately, the Samsung apps seem generally to be uninstallable, and some of them run all the time whether you want them to or not. It's pretty shocking to look at my running apps and see 1.1GB in use without me having loaded a single thing - yeah, this phone is crammed with what I'd call bloatware.


But it's also loaded with cool software features I personally haven't seen in a phone before. Multi-window support, which makes the phone a true multitasker and the only one I personally know of. Custom home screens for different tasks - in addition to an S pen-specific home screen that pops up when you remove the pen, you can also set up custom home screens for when you insert headphones, when you dock the phone, or other situations. One cool feature I stumbled on completely by chance (and this is your warning!) is DLNA support. Don't know what that means? Well, if you have a fairly new TV, and it happens to be on, just make sure you're not watching anything on the phone that you wouldn't want others to see when you press this button:


Any of your own videos - you know, the kind without DRM, that you'll be storing on your SD card - can be watched on your TV through the phone, wirelessly. It is really pretty cool, especially because of how seamless it is. It just works, instantly - and I don't even have a Samsung TV!


Sorry for the close zooming there, but I'm not interested in showing off my messy house. I can assure you I touched nothing on either the phone or TV (or its remote) other than the DLNA button on the phone.

Fortunately, the phone is rootable, which allows you to remove all the junk if you're so inclined, and there are also plenty of community ROMs available for you to install that strip all the unnecessary stuff out.

I personally wouldn't do that myself, at least not yet. Samsung puts their own loader on Android called TouchWiz, and the latest version (made specifically for the GN2) is actually quite good - and it's responsible for many of the things that make the GN2 what it is. Multi-window support - that's a TouchWiz feature, not an Android one. The S pen feature I talked about above - that's another. TouchWiz itself is also plenty fast - the phone does hitch up every once in a while, but I'm pretty convinced that's because of the running apps and services, not TouchWiz.

CALL QUALITY
I'm including this section mainly out of a sense of obligation, because in case I haven't mentioned it enough, this is a phone. The truth is I've never heard - nor has anyone on the other end of my calls, that I know of - any difference between any American phone that I've owned. The network you're on is the biggest factor in call quality, and Sprint's voice coverage is kind of middling, but no American network is perfect. There are always dropouts here and there, and there's always a tiny but noticeable digital delay. Most of the time, the sound quality itself is good, as you'd expect. Small speakers and microphones aren't rocket science.

I have high hopes now that Japan's Softbank is buying Sprint, and has pledged to heavily invest in their network. CEO Masayoshi Son has said he thinks American networks are a joke, and he wants to bring Sprint up to par with what you might expect in Japan. This actually helped convince me to stay with Sprint for my upgrade.

THE COMPETITION
And what about competing phones? Well, just as I was ordering my GN2, HTC and Verizon announced the Droid DNA - another big phone (though slightly smaller than the GN2) with a 5" screen. The Droid DNA's got the tech world's hearts all aflutter over its 1080p screen. But other than that one feature, the Droid DNA's a pretty pedestrian phone, with a weak, non-removable battery, only 16GB of onboard storage and no SD slot expansion. It also has a locked bootloader, so when that day comes when HTC and Verizon stop updating it (and given their history, that day will come soon), you're SOL.

There's of course the iPhone 5, which I honestly considered again in anticipation of its announcement, but I was disappointed with its lower, weird resolution that doesn't match any HD spec. It's also too small, with Apple insisting on making a phone that everyone can use with one hand, including house cats.

There's the LG Nexus 4, which again is a smaller phone but one that ships without any bloatware. I was eagerly awaiting this phone, until Google announced it and it had neither a MicroSD slot nor LTE support.  Pass.

Then there are other, more accurately labeled "phablets", none of which really seem to get the balance right. The GN2 succeeds because it is a phone, just a big one. I don't think I'd have liked the original Note as much, which was wider and more like a small tablet. The LG Intuition is similar, and just look at those sharp corners. It's also running an older version of Android.

I've been thinking about the reason why Android is beating iOS (except in the immediate aftermath of any new iPhone release) and why Samsung, specifically, is beating all other Android smartphone manufacturers lately. And I pretty firmly believe it's because of, not despite, the sort of wild west mentality of Android combined with the way Samsung blends old-school PC-style customization and features galore with a clean, modern style. The Android ecosystem is like a little microcosm of America - it's huge, messy and kind of anarchic, but it's also open and free and you can do what you want. The elephant in the room when it comes to technology is that we like things to be a little messy. A perfectly closed, perfectly symmetrical and perfectly maintained ecosystem is just unfamiliar and unintuitive to us - it's not a reflection of our reality, and we feel constrained. It's like living a real life in America and a mobile life in North Korea.

Apple, most Android manufacturers and even Google themselves lately have increasingly taken a closed approach to how you use your device - locking the bootloader, removing expansion slots, making the battery non-removable, etc. They do these things ostensibly to avoid "confusion", because they apparently think we are idiots who can't figure out where our stuff is. (Isn't this a failing of the OS rather than the user?) Everybody who thinks this way about us consumers needs to stop. Right now.

Why does a company like Samsung, with their old-school styli, user serviceable plastic construction, "confusing" SD slots, removable batteries and unlocked bootloaders, endless customization options, monster specs and insanely long feature lists sell boatloads more devices than anyone else?

The question answers itself. That this isn't incredibly fucking obvious to the rest of the industry - including Google and Apple - makes me want to take these guys out back and slap them. No, I'm not saying millions of people have purchased Samsung phones because of an unlocked bootloader.  But add up all these features and the different people they appeal to and you've got a hit phone. The conventional wisdom that we all want simple devices that limit what we can do is wrong.

Like most other device categories (cars, A/V receivers, refrigerators), what we really want is the kitchen sink, and the freedom to choose what features we do and don't use. And the sales data supports that fact. Maybe the rumored new Samsung OS wouldn't be such a bad idea after all.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
There's not much I would say I dislike about the GN2. In fact, my next phone will almost definitely be a Galaxy Note III. But what I'd like to see in the next Note is a more grippable surface, a 1080p screen, and an even bigger battery. Oh, and less bloat. Other than that, just keep on keeping on, Samsung.

Friday, November 16, 2012

Hurricane Sandy

I'll start by saying we're pretty lucky. I have power back now, for one thing, and our house had no real damage - nothing I couldn't fix with my bare hands, anyway. Just one mile away from here, it's still a complete shambles. I don't mean to make light of the situation down there or anywhere else with anything I'm about to write. This is just my experience living through Hurricane Sandy.

Despite my somewhat outdated blog title, these days I live on Long Island with my wife. Her job requires her to work whenever there's a disaster of any kind, so I'm left holding the fort. We technically live in an evacuation zone, but not for any real reason other than being on the wrong side of the only geographical feature that it makes sense for the government to use as the dividing line (a major road). But we're not in a flood plain and we're not really anywhere near the coast, so I stayed home during the hurricane, as I did during Irene.

The day of the hurricane started out pretty normally - we'd ridden out Irene with no real ill effects so I just worked from home and kept the TV on. Right around 5PM, we lost power, but I was prepared for that. I'd charged all my devices (including two tablets to keep me busy) and stocked up on food and water. I wasn't really prepared for how bad the wind got, though. It was nothing like Irene.

I shot a few short videos during the storm. The first was right around when we lost power, which was before the wind got really bad. The second (after it gets dark) was supposed to show this weird flashing light off in the distance, and I can see it in the original video but I think YouTube changed the frame rate and that killed most of the flashing. Our house is pretty quiet (it was built in 1923) so you don't hear the wind much in my videos shot from inside, but trust me when I say the whole house was shaking. Also, keep in mind I shot this during the storm, so I had no idea how bad it actually was - but you can hear how freaked out I sound. Any other day and even I'd say I sound like a drama queen, but I was watching debris flying down my street at about 100mph while I was recording some of this. I could see more than the blackness recorded on the video. Also, I make reference at one point to a lot of trees being down - I heard that on my police scanner, before the police themselves lost power and went dark.


It's hard to convey how weird the atmosphere was during the storm. Just total blackness punctuated by transformer explosions all around and this weird flashing light, no sound other than the wind. It was otherworldly.

After the wind died down a bit around 10PM, I tried to just keep myself busy any way I could.


The next morning I went out to survey the damage. Luckily our house was basically unscathed with the exception of one missing shingle from our shed and one piece of siding that popped loose, which I was able to mostly fix by hand. A lot of other houses had more damage, though, and I found this one block over:


There was a lot of that, and I discovered that most roads were actually impassable. This wasn't the biggest downed tree I saw, just the closest.

We ended up spending 4 days without power, which is nothing compared to what some people only a mile or so south of us have gone through. Being without power for any length of time is just miserable; it forces an entire lifestyle change. Humans lived without power for thousands of years but we're obviously not used to it here and now, and while I'm sure I could adapt if we suddenly went into full-on Revolution mode and nothing worked anymore, it's definitely a pretty major adjustment. You do what you can during daylight, then sit around the fire and talk at night. It sounds kind of romantic to describe it, but not when it's also freezing cold.


It's also very, very boring. This sounds like a first world problem but again, it's not the lack of power that's really the issue - it's being unprepared for a long outage. In the 1800's when nobody had power, they built their lifestyle around that fact - maybe you play a board game at night, or maybe one of the people in your family plays the banjo or something and everybody in the family dances around the fire. But we normally have power and only lost it for a few hours during Irene, so I had only prepared for an outage of about a day - all my "things to do" were based on battery power. Beyond that, picking up the newspaper at our local 7-11 (which was open and accepting cash despite also being powerless) was the highlight of the day. Once we wore out that paper, we were kind of stuck staring at nothing for the next few hours. By the 4th day we were starting to lose it a little bit. 4 days with power is nothing; 4 days without power feels like forever.

You can actually see this problem with people who still have no power - they're going crazy out of boredom. I don't blame them.


I actually managed to stretch out my Nexus 7 battery for all 4 days with judicious use. I did manage to read for an hour or two each night.


Freakin' Baseball '12 using my battery when I wasn't even playing it!


Our candle lineup... getting ready to light them for the night.

My wife and I handled the outage a little differently. I really started to get mopey on the 4th day, while my wife started getting artificially cheerful and got mad when I didn't follow along. Still, we both literally jumped up and down and hugged when the power came back - which it always does suddenly and without warning after an outage like this. One minute you're in the dark, the next, poof: you're back in the 21st century. The first thing we did was turn on the TV, and we were shocked by what we saw. We literally had no idea how bad it really was before that. The newspaper showed some photos, but it's different to see just how big and how many areas were affected.


It's a little hard to see, but gas lines started to form on the 3rd or 4th night. This was at 5:30AM on Saturday morning - can you believe that? I'd forgotten there even was a gas station near us - it's literally about 1/4 mile away, and people were lining up all the way down the avenue that runs perpendicular to my street. There's a cop car there to keep the peace, and that line near the bottom right corner of the photo is police tape to keep cars from turning onto my street and bothering us.


This was the first hint of blue sky. It took several days for the sky to clear up, unlike most hurricanes that move very quickly. Sandy just stuck around seemingly forever. Even after this little patch of blue, it was several more days before things really cleared up.


Here's the gas line a couple days later. I'm sure some of these people really needed it, but some of them were just idiots! They heard there were gas lines so goddammit, now they need to get gas! We got gas before the storm (like smart people) so even though my wife had to drive to work due to the transit outage, we were okay for a few days. Eventually the hysteria died down and we just drove up and got gas, no line.


To add insult to injury, while much of the area was still cleaning up after Sandy, we faced this just a couple weeks later. We ended up getting about 8" of heavy, wet snow, with leaves still on the trees - Sandy didn't bring our trees down but I was worried this storm would. One of our trees ended up resting on our roof from the weight, but luckily it all melted off by the next day (from the trees, not the ground).

After two hurricanes in two years, I really hope this area gets a little break for a while now.

Saturday, August 25, 2012

New computer - Apple IIgs!


I bought a new computer. It's an Apple IIgs.

The last and best Apple II. I've always wanted one of these, and I always get what I want. I am a patient man; I take the long view. So 25 years after its debut, I finally have my IIgs.

I think it's interesting that my Nexus 7 tablet - which is approximately 1,000 times more powerful than the entire IIgs - now fits entirely on top of one of the IIgs's 3.5" floppy drives. Didn't even notice it sitting there, did ya?

I've always been an Apple II guy - this was my first-ever computer:


I know this Apple IIc is mine because I carved the phone number of a girl I liked in the top of it.

I grew up with the rainbow logo. When Apple changed that, they ceased being the company I once knew.

I used my IIc from 1985 to literally about 1995. My dad finally bought me a 486 PC for my last two years at NYU. But I'd amassed a pretty impressive game collection and also had learned how to write my own programs in BASIC, so I had a real emotional attachment to this thing. And I'd hook it up every year or so just for nostalgia purposes.

But it's dead now. I fire it up and get no drive activity and just a bunch of gibberish on screen. Sad.

So I replaced it with the IIgs; may as well go for the best in the line at this point. The IIgs has a better processor, more memory and is much more expandable than the IIc (the IIe is equally expandable but not as powerful to start with, and it can't be upgraded to equal the IIgs because of the older CPU... at least not without actually turning it into a poor-man's IIgs).

The IIgs and original Macintosh came out at around the same time, and rumor is the IIgs was actually dumbed down so it didn't overshadow the somewhat pitiful original Mac. Even still, the IIgs seemed light years ahead - full color graphics, better sound, more RAM, faster CPU (albeit 16 bit vs. 32 bit... which didn't mean much in those days), and it even had a similar graphical OS.  But Apple wanted to push the Mac, so they pretty much buried the IIgs. I've always thought this had to be the first major battle between Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs - the II was Woz's line, while the Mac was more Jobs. And Woz is about the most laid back guy you'll ever see, so Jobs increasingly won those battles - Woz just didn't have the stomach for it.  I've always been kind of annoyed by that, because Woz's designs were always about the best engineering, whereas Jobs tried to make stuff that appealed to the masses.  I'm with Woz.

Well, I'm happy to be able to play my games and run my homebrew software again :)

(No, doing it with emulation isn't the same.)

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Portland 2012

I've been meaning to write up some of what we did in Portland last month for a while now - better do it before I forget everything! Had some great food there, and as always, got some amazing views.

We were there for a family thing and literally for just one day - our flight from San Francisco landed at around 10AM, and our flight back to NYC took off at 7AM the next day. So we didn't have a lot of time - just long enough to pack a few meals in and do a little sightseeing with my brother and his kids.  Always fun to see them, and we don't get to very often! Unfortunately the time constraints meant we had to cancel our hide-and-seek league match with Fred and Carrie...


I love the northwest - not Portland specifically, but I love the mountains, the lack of traffic (they complain about it anyway, but that'd be like me complaining that New York has too many parks), the amount of space, and just how laid back everything is. Pretty much everywhere's laid back compared to NYC, though - New Yorkers usually don't even realize how high-strung and nervous they are, in my experience.  But the northwest is also really beautiful, so I like it better than most places.


Any tourist in Portland these days has to go to Voodoo Doughnut. You see this line? This is probably mostly tourists. And this is why you shouldn't go to the original Voodoo Doughnut.

I'm going to ruin it now, but the best-kept secret in Portland is Voodoo Doughnut Too, which has actual parking and never has any lines but has the same decor and the same donuts. (The photo above was taken later, after we'd already gone to Voodoo Too.) Here I am playing some pinball:


Here's my maple bacon bar, which is kind of obligatory if you go to Voodoo Doughnut, which is itself obligatory:


It's a donut... with maple frosting... and bacon! So if you go to Portland, you're going to need to get a maple bacon bar at Voodoo Doughnut (Too). There's no use fighting it. It's going to happen.


After the family event, we headed downtown for lunch. Portland's known for food trucks and my brother knew just where to find them.


My wife and I checked out Tabor, the home of the "original schnitzelwich".  Now, we have a lot of different kinds of food in NYC, but I'm pretty sure I've never seen a schnitzelwich, and definitely not one you can buy out on the street. So I was curious.


This is actually my wife's half sandwich (being held by me). I got a whole one but had almost finished it by the time I remembered to take a picture. It was quite delicious! Freshly made - really crispy pork just out of the fryer (they also have chicken), with fresh vegetables, some kind of sauce that I've forgotten now but I remember being really unique and complementary, and then some really amazing fresh bread. I recommend this truck.


Later we took a walk around our hotel. We stayed at the Embassy Suites near the airport, since we needed to fly at 7AM. Portland Airport is really cool in that it's practically in the wilderness, and you can walk along the Columbia River right outside its grounds. On the other hand, it's also really not far from downtown. It's hard to believe, but the photo above is really only maybe 10-15 minutes from downtown Portland.


That's a 180 degree panorama photo of the river. On the other side of that path is the airport.


This is the other side of that path. (Well, there's a road in between too.)

For dinner, my brother took us to this great southern style restaurant that I feel really bad that I've forgotten the name of (and I forgot to take a photo of the outside of it too). I'll add it in here later once I find out again. Anyway, that's another style of cooking that's hard to find in NYC (there used to be the Acme Bar & Grill, but it closed and turned into some fine dining abomination). I wanted to have me some hush puppies!


Ok, no hush puppies on that plate, but we did get a big heaping pile of them separately. (My picture-taking was haphazard at best on this trip, admittedly.) This was my pulled pork sandwich. Honestly, kind of hard to mess up pulled pork, and they didn't - just look at that thing! This picture is making me hungry.


Afterwards we went back to the hotel - we'd been going pretty hard for three days straight so we were pretty worn out by that point. My brother calls this "typical Embassy Suites construction" but I've never stayed in one so I was pretty impressed with the atrium. It was a nice hotel. And unlike the Hilton in San Francisco (which was also otherwise nice), I did not have strange noises that alternately sounded like large water droplets or somebody walking around in high heels above me waking me up at 4AM.

That was pretty much the trip. I really hope we can go back to Oregon soon; it's just got such a pleasant atmosphere.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

How to: Rip a Blu-Ray disc (or DVD) to your Nexus 7 using free software

This is one of those posts borne out of frustration. I wrote in my Nexus 7 review that it was unnecessarily difficult to get video that I already own onto my new tablet, and that's doubly true if you're talking stuff you have on Blu-Ray. Do a Google search for "rip Blu-ray to nexus 7" and all the results you'll get are spam results from commercial software developers trying to sell you their generic ripping software. (Well, hopefully not anymore!)

But you can do it just as well (probably better) with two free tools. Here's what you need:

1. MakeMKV
This tool does the actual ripping, and it strips the decryption and region protections. This is really the key to the whole thing, although just the first step. MakeMKV is the only free tool I know of that can rip a copy-protected Blu-Ray disc.


Use it the default way and you'll end up with a bit-perfect mkv file of your disc's video and audio streams.

2. Handbrake
Handbrake is your transcoder - now that you have this giant mkv file, you need to turn it into something your tablet can realistically store and play.

That means:

Frame size: 1280 x 720 for Blu-Ray rips
Format: h.264
File size: as small as possible!

Click for a larger view of the picture settings

The Nexus 7 only has 8GB or 16GB of storage, so you need to find a balance of size vs. quality. Obviously you're probably going to have to compromise a bit - you're not going to get full Blu-Ray quality out of your final file unless you only want one video on your tablet... and nothing else.

Click for a larger view of the video settings

I did several tests with a fast-moving video with lots of color and motion (if you must know, it was Scandal's "Love Survive", which just happens to be chapter 1 on a Blu-Ray disc I was trying to transcode). Sometimes it's best to use a constant bit rate, which makes it easier to predict the ending file size, but often using a quality setting works best. It just depends on the video.

The Handbrake developers recommend a quality setting of 22 for Blu-Ray quality (lower quality setting numbers are better). The default is 20 - better than 22 - so I tried that first for reference. This video is 3:47 long, so you can consider that when looking at the file sizes below. Here are some screenshots of the lovely Rina from the same frame in that video - you can click them for a larger view:

Quality 20 - the reference. Pretty much indistinguishable from the original Blu-Ray, just with a smaller frame size for the Nexus 7. 205MB.
Quality 30. Not too bad; definitely some jagged edges and a little macroblocking, but remember, this is a fast-motion scene. It's hard to notice any issues at 30fps, and on a 7" screen. On the flipside, this file was about 1/3 the size of the quality 20 file. 78MB.
Quality 40. Clearly getting a bit crap at this point. 33.8MB.

1000kbps. Thoroughly unacceptable. 37.6MB.
1300kbps. Still completely unacceptable. The tests continue! 45.6MB.
1500kbps. Starting to get better, but still nowhere near the quality of the reference quality 30 file, let alone the quality 20. 51MB.
2000kbps. Now almost to the point of the quality 30 file. 64.5MB.
I went with quality 30 for the full BD. The 2000kbps file looked decent and was a bit smaller, but I'd rather err a bit on the side of keeping a constant look to the video than shaving a few bits here and there but potentially screwing up certain scenes. I have done one other BD so far that turned out surprisingly well at 1000kbps, though, so it really does depend a bit on the content of the video. You might have to do your own tests... if only more tablets had memory card slots so we wouldn't need to worry about this! It's barbaric.

After you've got the final file transcoded, you need to get it onto your Nexus 7. Connect the cable that came with your tablet to your computer, and it'll show up as a device under "My Computer". Open it, then open the "Movies" folder and drag your file in there. Once it's done copying, you can open your "Movies" app, select "Personal Videos" and voila - your file should be there.


Obviously, this entire process isn't something you're going to sit down and do in the few spare minutes you have after packing and before your taxi arrives to take you to the airport for a flight. In fact, depending on your computer, this may be something you leave running overnight. For me, it's only really worth it for stuff I know I'll rewatch over and over - mostly music and concert videos that aren't available any other way. For movies, it's probably going to be better to just hope Netflix has something, or pay Google the rental fee.

The nice thing is that once you learn Handbrake, you can also use it for videos you download and want to transfer to your Nexus. You can even make your default Nexus settings a preset.

About This Blog

This is increasingly not a blog about Alphabet City, New York. I used to live in the East Village and work on Avenue B, but I no longer do. Why don't I change the name if I'm writing about Japan and video games and guitars? Because New Yorkers are well-rounded people with varied interests, and mine have gone increasingly off the rails over the years. And I don't feel like changing the name. I do still write about New York City sometimes.

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