Tag Archives: PC

Computers, Technology

Best Handheld Ever

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I love new tech and gadgets – even at my old age – and I recently found the ultimate gaming handheld.  I’ve had a Nintendo Switch for several years, and still do, but this is something completely different.  I’ve always been a PC enthusiast, and I use them all day, every day for my job as well.  I like playing with the newest, smallest tech, so I buy small but powerful desktop PCs, like Intel NUCs, but I also enjoy the high-end gaming PCs that can handle just about anything you throw at them.  Lately I’ve even focused so much of my time on PCs, that I haven’t had any time at all to play any of the gaming consoles I had, which included an X-Box (original version), an X-Box One, a PS3, PS4, a Nintendo Wii-U, and the original model of the Nintendo Switch.  So I ended up selling those systems and the hundreds of game cartridges, discs and accessories that went with them.

So these days I’m all-in on PCs (except for the new Nintendo Switch model – since Nintendo hasn’t given in to offering their current Switch games on any other platforms, YET…like most other companies do, I’m hanging onto it for now, just so I can still play the latest Nintendo games.  But I digress.  I’m all-in on the PC train, which made this purchase a no-brainer:  The ROG Ally.  To put it quite simply, it’s a Windows 11 Gaming PC in a handheld form factor.  That means it’ll run pretty much everything any PC will run, which is perfect for me.

The design of the ROG Ally is really nice, and it feels really nice and comfortable, with a very crisp, clear screen.  I’ve spent several hours at a time playing games on it without any issues (except eye fatigue, but that’s a personal issue of mine as I get older, not any fault of the device).  I’ve heard that the new version of the Steam Deck, now with an OLED screen, is much better, but it’s still only 800p. The ROG Ally is 1080p, but you can lower it if needed.  Same with refresh rate – it’s 120Hz, but can be adjusted as needed, and all of these settings are instantly accessible using a special button to bring up the “Armoury Crate” app, which includes a fully customizable control panel of all of your favorite and most-used settings, including an overlay options very much like Google’s “stats for nerds” option in YouTube.  It’ll show specific memory, CPU, FPS, and other details overlayed on the screen, permanently, until you turn it back off.  This is very handy for troubleshooting or reviewing app or system performance.

Windows 11 isn’t the best with touchscreen support, but ROG has managed to make it quite usable with their add-on apps and drivers that are accessible from a few added buttons on the device.  There was, and still is, a little learning curve involved, but I’m getting pretty comfortable with everything after a few weeks of using it so far.  I still prefer to use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse when doing a lot of configuring and installing of software and games on it, but that’s normal for a new PC.  The beauty of it is being able to take it anywhere and be able to play everything I like without having to lug around my heavy gaming laptop everywhere.

I originally purchased the 512GB ROG Ally, which is the better, faster version of their two models with a faster CPU than their other model, then Best Buy had a Black Friday deal on a SSD upgrade specifically for the ROG Ally and Steam Deck handhelds, offering 1TB and 2TB options, so I couldn’t pass up a 2TB upgrade.  The install was pretty simple and went flawlessly, I just had to do a “Cloud Restore”, which is an option in the ROG Ally’s BIOS, then I had to restore all of my games and updates again.  I hadn’t gotten very far into initially installing all of my games at that point, so it wasn’t much of an issue to start over again.  So right now, with the 2TB SSD and a 1TB microSD card I had left over from a Nintendo Switch that I had previously sold, I now have 3TB of storage on my ROD Ally, which is plenty of room for everything I need.

My game collection also includes emulators for many old game platforms and a collection of tens of thousands of classic games from the past that I have amassed over the years, such as thousands of N64, NES, SNES, Sega Saturn, Gamecube, and Atari, all of which run great on Windows 11, so they also work fine on the ROG Ally.  This makes it truly priceless for me, literally providing me with every game I own, at my fingertips, anywhere I go with it.  I decided to dedicate the slightly slower 1TB microSD card to just my emulators, so I pared down a 5TB portable collection of about 65,000 retro games to just under 1TB.  I ended up with about 45,000 games and much less garbage and duplicate games, keeping all of the gems and classics.  That’s just 1 TB.  The faster 2TB I’m using for the OS, the “Grade A” games and everything else.

The sound on the ROG Ally is also really nice, though I often connect my Anker Soundcore earbuds when I use it, just for the privacy, noise-cancelling, and enhanced audio.  At this point I just want to lug this thing everywhere, just in case it might come in handy.  I can watch or play anything – Plex for movies & TV shows, YouTube, Spotify… well, you get it, it’s a PC.

To wrap things up, here is my list of the Pros and Cons with the ROG Ally 512GB Handheld:

PROS:

  • Runs ALL Windows 11 applications and games – Steam Deck runs on SteamOS and only runs compatible Steam Games.  This is akin to how the iPad locks you into only running Apple’s App Store games and apps.
  • Touchscreen – Same size screen as the Steam Deck, but 1080p resolution – Steam Deck is only 800p.
  • 120Hz refresh rate, adjustable as needed.
  • Power adjustable 10w (Super Quiet) – 35w (Turbo mode).
  • Lighter than the Steam Deck.
  • I can remote to it easily, just like a regular PC, whenever needed.
  • Controls feel nice and are well laid out – all buttons are fully customizable in 2 modes: Gamepad or Keyboard.
  • Two additional buttons on the back, fully programmable, and two added front-panel buttons specifically for ROG Ally’s settings (Armoury Crate)

CONS:

  • Learning curve involved with what button mode to use for each game and game type.
  • Battery lasts 90 minutes to 2 hours with heavy gaming.  Using lower power settings can extend that to 4-5 hours though.  I purchased as 30,000 mAh 65w fast-charging power bank to use with it, which easily gives me a full day of battery use.
  • Single USB-C type connection for everything – charging, external display, etc. – and it’s located on the TOP of the ROG Ally, so there’s no way to have a wireless dock connection.  Even with a premium dock with fans, multiple USB ports, HDMI, network port, etc., it still requires a short physical wire connected from the dock to the top of the ROG Ally.  I highly recommend a magnetic USB-C adapter so a dock or charger can easily be attached and detached thousands of times without ever damaging the port on the ROG Ally at all.  (I now always use one of these adapters on my cell phone as well – they’re priceless for ease of use and safety, if you’ve ever tripped over a USB cable before while your phone was charging with it)
  • When in use, a lot of heat blows from the top vents.  This is only a negative for ME though… our two chihuahuas enjoy the extra heat, and often snuggle up with me when I’m sitting on the couch playing games on it.
News, Playstation (Sony), X-Box (Microsoft)

Update on my Lego Worlds addiction

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I certainly haven’t stopped playing Lego Worlds.  In fact, it has gotten a bit out of hand.  I now have it on 4 platforms: X-Box One, PS4, Switch and Steam.  Crazy, right?  I only mention it now because I just completed another milestone.  I just made it to 100 gold bricks on the PC version.  Here’s my stats for each system:

Switch – 985 items, 106 gold bricks
X-Box – 1175 items, 115 gold bricks
PS4 – 1194 items, 127 gold bricks
PC – 830 items, 100 gold bricks

With that goal completed, my next goal is a bit more challenging and probably only requires a bit of time:  Acquire all building block types on each platform.  On PS4 I’m actually at 100% already.  I’m not sure how, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t coincidence.  The game seems to just “give” you another piece you need when you either tackle the troublemaker in any world or open a chest.  This is completely random though, and most of the time you’ll get other items, including gold bricks, tools, or actual brick builds.  It just seems to be very random, so it only takes time to eventually get there.  It should be interesting to see how long it takes.  I’ll keep noting my progress here once in awhile.  Not that anyone’s actually interested though.

 

 

 

 

 

Entertainment, News, Playstation (Sony)

Lego Worlds – A review

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Hello, my name is Jim and I’m an addict. Yeah, I’m a grown-up… And still I play with toys. Legos are all the rage these days–even in the movies. So when Lego Worlds was recently released for the PS4, I jumped on it almost immediately. I’ve had the Early Release version for the PC on Steam for quite some time, but I only played it once in awhile. It was a really cool open world system, and you just dove in and started playing around with objects and characters, building and breaking things, etc., etc., much like Minecraft. I find many games a bit difficult to play on the PC unless I have my Steam controller optimally configured for that particular game, and in the case of Lego Worlds on Steam, I just wasn’t able to get it working to my liking, and often gave up trying to get it to work properly for me. So when the PS4 version was released, I knew that, finally, it must have a controller configuration good enough to work with on the PS4, so I gave it a shot.

I don’t know if the Steam version ever received the same treatment that the PS4 version now has, but there certainly wasn’t Tutorial levels and gameplay like there is on the PS4 version when I was playing it on Steam! My initial experience with the PS4 version was totally new, and it’s really interesting how it first teaches you the basics, giving you lessons along the way, and as you progress through the tutorial levels you learn more and more about how everything works, more items are given to you, and you basically (at least in my case) become addicted and want more and more eye candy, game candy, object builds, blocks, gold bricks… The tutorials end after 3 or 4 different worlds are “completed”, then you unlock the main “game” that in-turn unlocks everything else. The ultimate goal being to reach 100 Gold Bricks, which unlocks the ability to create NEW worlds of your very own. So this is all sort of a huge “training ground”, or a giant tutorial if you will, to prepare you for the open world creation freedom that is to come–which then, I imagine, works somewhat like Minecraft, where you can either start with a blank world, scarcely populated or completely blank, and build upon it whatever you will. Except that with THIS game, the tools at your disposal are far beyond anything I’ve ever seen in Minecraft!

But getting that far (100 Gold Bricks) is still on my horizon, so I can’t really say for sure how that part of the experience is yet (hence the “incomplete review” title). I’m at 71 Gold Bricks as of this writing, and climbing daily. The pace at which you gain bricks varies quite a bit, from what I’ve seen though. What happens after the tutorials is the ability for you to generate random worlds, then travel to them, explore and plunder them, all in an effort to gather everything you can from the world. This includes completing quests the characters on that world ask of you, finding chests filled with objects (including Gold Bricks), exploring, tackling troublemakers (who will come up to you and taunt you with the game piece they’re holding, then run from you as you try to tackle them to get the piece) and just plain trashing everything you can to gain studs (every Lego game’s currency). When you “Discover” an object in the game it gets added to your inventory, but you can’t actually “use” the object until you purchase it in the game using some studs. The value of each object in the game is pre-defined–for example it might cost 2,500 studs for a particular in-game vehicle–so if you pay that to unlock it, you can then deploy that vehicle anywhere, on any world, and use it in whatever way suits you. Or, perhaps an object is needed to complete a quest, and you have it… Use it and get rewarded with even more studs to use in the game. Added to all of this is the expansion of world sizes you can play in. You start out with just small worlds (as if that doesn’t overwhelm you enough), but after obtaining so many Gold Bricks you unlock Medium-sized worlds and everything is a lot bigger. Then, further on you unlock Large-sized worlds, and then, finally, Huge-sized worlds.

This very open-ended random-world generation makes things pretty interesting, and definitely a one-of-a-kind experience for everyone, and your own personality and tendencies come into play quite a bit. For example, there’s some really neat dungeons in the game, which are filled with traps, puzzles and monsters… Get through those successfully and you’re rewarded with many huge piles of studs! This is all really fun to play around with, but a smart kid just in a hurry to reach the end-game knows that with all of the tools available at that point in the game, one could simply pull out the landscaping tool and level the entire dungeon in one fell swoop.. or use to bazooka to blast right through the walls to the treasure. I considered this myself, briefly, before deciding to take the high road and experience the dungeon like I assume it was intended. Maybe later on I’ll come back and play around with leveling it, even if only to see how it was built and to possibly use some of it’s traps in the free world-building part of the game that I haven’t gotten to yet.

The game isn’t without it’s little quirks and bugs though. But I’d expect as much for a project this vast. There will no-doubt be updates to fix it up, I’m sure. One complaint I have might be a bug, but I’m not really sure. Right now it’s just an annoyance for me. Another family member found an awesome random world and wanted me to try it out. There’s an option to enter a random world “seed” on the main world selection screen, so I assumed this would allow me to enter the number he provided and I could then play that same world. So I entered the number, it appeared to show it in the mini map, but when I travel to the world, it’s a completely different random world! I can’t seem to get it to accept that exact number sequence, though it does allow me to see a preview of it. Very annoying. I can’t find a solution (or others even complaining about the same thing) on the web yet, so I think it’s just a bug that hasn’t been discussed yet.

So that’s the game, in a nutshell. I’ve been through the desert, the old west, a few very hot lava-filled planets, a few made of candy, some desert islands with interesting surprises, many caves containing buried treasure among other creepy things like spiders, scorpions and even zombies and swamp monsters, cloud cities and have even found many underwater treasures–including sunken shipwrecks, sharks, fish and even a few underwater cities. I can tell that the creators sure spent a lot of time either manually building whole areas brick by brick or wrote one heck of a procedural engine to generate worlds! It seems they are endless in their quantity, somehow. Like Minecraft, it boggles the mind. And, in the process, it feels like by the time I’m up to the 100 Gold Bricks needed I will have amassed hundreds of “discoveries” consisting of vehicles, characters, animals, insects, weapons, objects, and even whole “brick builds” (one-click mass-builds of large objects that assemble themselves before your eyes, instantly), and I will have learned quite a bit about the Lego world and what I am capable of as a “Master Builder”. I can see there’s also a lot of artistic skill needed as well, so for me things are going to take a lot longer to get right if I’m going to create any Lego Worlds of my very own. I’m sure going to want to, after spending this much time working through the entire game.

I’ll be sure to come back and complete this review or write a completely new one after I have completed the 100-Gold-Brick goal and am able to create entirely new worlds in the game. At that point I’m sure I’ll know even more about it and have much more to say. Now I’m going to head back into this Atlantis-looking underwater world I just found… I sure wish I could hold my breath for longer though… maybe I’ll find a or earn some scuba gear soon.

The Finish Line – Update added 3/24/2017

I made it. Last night, after sitting at 98 Gold Bricks for a day, I jumped in and made the push to 100 and made it. I saved the last 7 minutes of my gameplay if you’d like to watch it: https://youtu.be/NFaPjYGQ39c. As a subtext to the video: I had a trapped, frightened gingerbread person stuck on a rooftop. He/She had a gold brick, and if I could save them I would get my 100th brick. I had previously tamed several pigs, so they were following me around at this time. After some playing around with the landscape tool I managed to get the character to drop to the ground. As the gingerbread character pulled out its gold brick to throw it to me, he was attacked by my pigs and killed! NO BRICK FOR ME! Nazi Soup Pigs. But soon it happened again–another frightened gingerbread person in the same area… So I immediately took action, usied my scimitar, and sliced me up some tasty bacon to get that elusive last gold brick!

Obtaining 100 gold bricks gives you the rank of “Master Builder” and also unlocks the option to “Create custom worlds” in the game. So I played around with that option for the rest of the evening (and this morning before work) and I must say, the options are nice. I was a little disappointed at first when I couldn’t find an option to just start with a completely “clean slate” – just a blank, empty world, flat, with nothing in it – but I soon found that this was probably not an oversight, it was most likely done on purpose. You can, as they say, “create the Lego world of your dreams”, and if you desire a blank, flat world, well… go for it! It’s doable. Just do it.

Technically, you can’t actually “Create a new world”, as the voiceover announcer describes it at the end of obtaining 100 gold bricks (as you hear him say in my saved video). That’s deceiving, and I think it was actually a mistake. the game itself shows the option as “Create a custom world”. This is a bit more accurate, because you can only choose the individual Biomes, Animals, Characters, Vehicles and the world size you would like, then click the “create” button, and what it does is give you a world seed of that size, with those options set. It’s still a pre-defined world, with a seed you can share with any other Lego Worlds player. Your version of it might be just initially populated a little differently than anyone else’s, based on your preferences.

But this was a very interesting design choice for the game, as you’ll see. I set out, then, so create what I just mentioned above: A flat world, like a clean slate to start with–no animals, objects, or anything–sort of a complete beginning–so I know exactly what’s in that world, and everything in it I know came from me. The various tools available in the game are very fun to learn and use, so it’s not a problem at all. I chose the smallest world size, and just one “open prairie” biome, so the world would be as easy to flatten as possible, with the least number of objects to have to destroy and clean up. I used the “flatten” landscaping tool to level everything down (or up) to the same level, making it all flat. I guess I should say “am using”, as I’m still actively working on this world as I write this. My initial world came with many vehicles, animals and characters spread all over it, including a quest area or two, so I have plenty of work to do. As I level the landscape, animals on it will shift up or down to meet the ground and keep travelling on it, and I’ll select them and “remove” them to pop them out of existence. Sometimes I’ll run into a character or animal I haven’t discovered yet, requiring me to complete a quest first, before I can work with that particular animal or character. This is a fun side-objective, and it also provides you with more characters, objects and animals to use in the game. It even makes the dullness of simply flattening everything on the entire map much less so.

So create the Lego world of your dreams is fun, and there’s plenty to do along the way, so get busy. There are even plenty more gold bricks I can obtain as well as secret “Legendary” puzzle pieces which can be assembled to reveal even larger “Legendary Gold Bricks”, as well as many other things. It also seems like I will never have every single object, animal, character or vehicle in the game, so opening chests and completing quests can always earn me something new and unexpected along the way–especially with the possibility of downloadable content and add-ons that are sure to come later on. So I’m heading back in now, gotta keep flattening. Haylie wants an empty landscape to build her dream world on the next time she visits. This concludes my review.  I really like this game.

Entertainment, Playstation (Sony)

Playstation Now

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Sony offers a new service for PS4 users called “Playstation Now”.  What it does is offer a free “streaming” library of classic PS3 games that you can run on your PS4, much like how Hulu and Netflix offer streaming movies.  You pay a monthly fee for full access, and in return you get open access to their entire library of Playstation Now titles (currently over 400 games).

Kevin and I are trying it out right now with a free 1-week trial.  So far, it seems to be pretty decent.  Another big benefit is that with this membership you also get the ability to play all of these games on a PC.  This doesn’t come without it’s own little hitches though–your PC must meet the minimum specs to run the Playstation Now software and you must connect a PS4 controller to your PC, either with a USB cable or with an adapter available for an additional fee from Sony.

I’ve been on a 7-day free trial for several days now, and I’ve tried most features as well as dozens of games.  The pricing is currently $19.99/month or $44.99 for 3 months (about $15/month).  Somehow the games really are “streamed” too.  This means they’re not installed on your PS4 or your PC, the data they use is streamed over the internet while you’re playing the game.  There may be some temporary storage on your local drive, but this appears to be removed once you exit the game you’re playing.  I have played over 40 games from Playstation Now so far, and have noticed no decrease in the free space on my PS4.

Gladly, each time you play a new game from the service, an icon for it is added to your PS4, just like any other installed game icon.  This means that in order to play that game again, you only need to open that icon and don’t have to re-open the Playstation Now application each time (unlike Hulu or Netflix).  I love this feature!  This way, I only see my favorite games on my PS4 and I can organize them any way I wish.  I chose not to mix these titles with my installed and purchased PS4 games, so I created a folder called “Playstation Now” and I put all of those games in that folder (along with an icon for Playstation Now itself, for easy access when I need it).

Sony has been pretty active with adding new games to the service, and I believe 20+ games were added just this past month.  This is quite a few more than Playstation Plus, which is currently offering 2 games per month for PS4, 2 games for PS3, and 2 games for PS Vita–their handheld game system.

When you start a game from Playstation Now, it downloads what it needs from the server, so naturally it takes a little longer to start a game.  But with today’s internet speeds, and Sony’s Internet speed requirements for subscribers to actually be able to use the service, this isn’t very long at all.  At least not for me.  I must admit, however, that I do have the top speed tier with Time Warner Cable, so I’m not sure how much of a difference that would actually make compared to other Internet Service Providers.

I do have a few concerns about the service at this point though:

  1. What will Sony do when they run out of old PS3 games to offer?  And when will this happen?  I’m not too sure developers are still developing games for the PS3, and if they are, it has to be much less than when it was Sony’s top gaming platform.
  2. One time, when trying to start a Playstation Now game, I was told that all of the servers were busy and I had to wait in a queue.  The wait time was currently 1-2 minutes.  After that wait time, the game launched.  As the service gets more and more popular, will this happen more and more and will wait times get longer and longer just to play?  Or will Sony reliably add more and more servers as needed to keep up with the volume?
  3. Did Sony choose to not allow backward compatibility on the PS4 just so they could make more money with this subscription service?  X-Box One has backward compatibility, though not 100%, but they’re improving it more all the time.  We still have our old PS3, and plan to keep it, now that we know we can’t play any of our old games on our PS4–unless we keep paying for Playstation Now–which offers many of those games, but still not all of them, though it does include many other good games we hadn’t ever played on PS3.  I guess I’d have to add up the possible cost of the entire Playstation Now library (which continues to grow all the time) and compare that with the monthly fee times how long we’ll potentially keep our PS4 to see which would save us the most money in the long run.  That’s a tough one.

Life is but a stream…So it seems like you’re actually running your game on a PS3 server somewhere at Sony, and your PS4 (or your PC) is simply serving up the screens it’s fed.  If this is the case, I don’t know how it can keep up without severe lag, but somehow it does…most of the time.  Several times during gameplay I have noticed the announced warning icon appearing in the corner of the screen.  They explain this icon each time a game is started, explaining that this means your internet connection quality (speed) has decreased, and you should save any progress you’ve made, if possible, just in case you lose your connection to the server.  Nearly every time this appeared, it disappeared again a short time later and I noticed little to no effect.  There may have been some frame loss resulting in a little jittering in image quality, but nothing else.  In one case, however, I’ve lost connection completely and the game exited on me.  A few minutes later I was able to re-launch it and pretty much picked up where I left off pretty easily.  Basically, before you subscribe, you definitely want to go with the free 1-week trial and make sure your own internet connection is reliable enough to play the games without issue.

Another key question I had with the service was whether it worked just like purchased game licenses work on the PS4.  This is where you can purchase one license for a game, install it on two PS4’s in your household, and two players (the players set a “primary” users on each other’s PS4’s) and both play that game together or separately.  I was hoping that this functionality also applied to Playstation Now, and I wasn’t disappointed.  It worked fine for Kevin and I, and we both played a long session of “ibb and obb” together (a simple, yet very interesting mind-bending puzzle game–something, it turns out, Kevin is actually better at than me!).

But so far, overall, I’m impressed.  I had no idea at all that you could stream games this way, using virtually no local hard drive space.  I had assumed this service would end up maxing out my hard drive and I’d be constantly swapping games out and installing others just to play everything.  The price seems a bit steep, but since the entire library of 400+ titles and growing weekly or monthly, I think it beats to 2-titles-per-month that Playstation Plus gives you…even though Plus gives you genuine PS4 titles that you then own a license for and have to install locally (but on the other hand, you own that license to the game, even if you stop subscribing to Playstation Plus, unlike Playstation Now where you lose access to its entire library if you stop subscribing.  At $15 per month (paying 3 months at a time) it would work for both Kevin and I on one account, so we could split the cost.  That brings it down to just $7.50 per month for each of us, which isn’t bad, in my opinion.

That’s about it.  Now let me go play some Red Dead Redemption, which I see was just added to the PSNow library…

Technology

Drone

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home-from-droneThis weekend Matt stopped by with his new drone!  Wow, what a piece of technology!  I was a little curious at the start, but much more so once he was flying it and showing us the features.  He bought a rather expensive model (at least in my book), and it has some pretty sweet features and specs, including a nice gimble & camera.  The gimble allows for beautifully smooth movement of the camera while shooting up to 4K video or 12-megapixel snapshots.

He started it up in the driveway, got up between 200 and 300 feet to clear everything tall in the neighborhood, then flew it around.  I must say, it scared me a bit knowing how much that little toy costed, and watching it zoom out of sight over the neighborhood.  It has a decent range, but I still found it scary.  It probably would have felt even worse, had I been the one who paid for it!  He mentioned getting to a certain point where the video starts to cut out…sheesh, now THAT could give me heart issues… but there’s a nifty little “Go Home” feature and calls it back and it comes right back to your location.

After some flying around and recording (both from my cell phone and from the 4K camera on the drone) until the drone’s battery was nearly dead and getting pretty chilly in the 32-degree weather, we came back inside to warm up and figure out how to view the footage as quickly as possible.

I transferred the videos to my PC and could view them there, but we wanted to watch them on the big TV.  It’s 1080p though, so we couldn’t actually view them in full 4K quality.  I used my laptop, which already has a dock connected to the TV, and the video looked awesome!

The video on a MicroSD card is limited to 4GB file sizes, so our footage was split into two files – one about 8 minutes (4GB in size), and the other about 6 minutes (about 3GB in size).  I wanted to use ShareStudio, an app on the PS4, to edit the video, but unfortunately, the PS4 didn’t recognize the video file format that the drone used.

After we finished ogling the fine footage, I dropped the videos into my YouTube channel to start uploading them to the internet.  After a few hours they completed, and the footage still looks quite impressive there, and now we can share them with everyone easily.  Take a look if you want.  Here’s Part 1 and Part 2 from the drone, and my cell phone footage.

I want to be able to edit those three videos into one nice one, complete with cuts back and forth between be shooting the drone, and the drone shooting me, when we were playing with the “Follow Me” feature of the drone, but I tried doing so in Corel VideoStudio, but it didn’t work out so well.  The resulting video, which I wanted to save as a 4K video, was horrible with dropped frames throughout and full choppiness, rendering it unwatchable.  I might try it again at 1080p, just to see if it’s the 4K it can’t handle, or if my PC’s just not powerful enough to handle the job.

 

Entertainment, Music

Spotify Review

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I’m trying out Spotify. After hearing so many good things about it, and having looked at a few other streaming music services, I thought I’d give this one a shot. I’m already past my 7-day trial, and now on my first free 30 days. I’m hoping to know definitively, by the time it comes to charge me the first time, whether I’m going to stick with it or go back. So far, here’s what I’ve learned:  Spotify seems to have the largest music library out of all of the streaming music services–or at least pretty close–and it’s definitely the most popular.

The Good: I love the 12-second cross-fade. I haven’t seen this feature since my old MediaMonkey days, and I really like it. It sort of feels like a DJ-blended mix when I listen this way, smoothly fading between each song. Then there’s the simple “SAVE” button on every album, which saves it to “My Music” instantly, making it easy to find anything I grab when browsing their gazillion tracks. And once you “Save” an album, the option to make it “Available Offline” appears as a toggle switch, which results in the album downloading to your device locally. You can even stay offline for up to 30 days before you have to go online again, at least to “check in” to make sure you’re still a Spotify member. Very nice. It seems they’ve got both solutions (the ability to offer their vast library to their members available for STREAMING as well as offer local downloading and saving of any content for the members who prefer to download–or can’t afford to constantly stream). The interface is pretty solid with a nice layout and options. And I believe Spotify has the largest music selection out of all of the current streaming services, so it’s probably the best one to go with, if I stick with a streaming service.

The Not-So-Bad: Just after I signed up, I spot-checked some of my old classics, just to test the waters. For the most part, everything was there and easy to find. I had an issue with a few albums though, and this one kinda bugs me: I searched for Hootie & The Blowfish’s album “Cracked Rear View”, as this is an old favorite of mine. I couldn’t find the album, though there were other Hootie songs and one other album I found, as well as a few of the songs from Cracked Rear View on other albums. So I figured out how to do “Local Files” on the PC, I dropped my old copy of Cracked Rear View into it, then created a playlist that contained the album, which showed up on my phone in Spotify, then I was able to stream and/or download it. That worked ok, but the very next day, I played around some more, and there was Cracked Rear View, in Spotify, like it had always been there. I removed it from my “Local Files”, and it’s on Spotify now. Was that just a weird coincidence, or does Spotify just monitor user searches and Local Files and act on what they find really really quickly??? If it’s the latter, that would be amazing to learn. Wow, that would be amazing. Now I’m anxious to find another one that’s missing and do the exact same thing just to prove it was a coincidence. So that’s not so bad.

The Bad: I have over 67,000 local songs and audiobooks, all purchased as MP3’s, extracted from CDs, or converted from other formats, accumulated over the years. To quickly answer my next question, I pointed “Local Files” on my PC to my entire music section. I gave it a full day to add, catalog and index it all, but it failed miserably. Spotify on my PC froze up each time I clicked on Local Folders to view them, sometimes it even worked, somewhat, and displayed the tracks, but I wasn’t able to search them so they were pretty much useless to work with. If I were going to use “Local Files”, I would have to pick and choose the exact albums to make available to Spotify. I think 67,000 songs is way too much for it to handle at this time. One other feature that most other music players that I’ve used on my android device (and Audible) have is the ability for the app to pause or at least lower its volume when it loses temporary “focus”–this is when a notification sound occurs on the system, or another application uses the audio momentarily, such as Runtastic, which has a voice coach that announces my workout progress every so often while I walk. Spotify doesn’t have this feature, and I’ve grown very fond of it over the years with all my other apps. It makes them sort of “cooperate” with each other instead of fighting for the audio all at the same volume.

So, overall, I’m fairly impressed. It has it’s flaws, but nothing so bad I find it unusable. I’ll continue giving it a solid workout for a couple more weeks before they take their first $9.99 out of my wallet.

If you use or have used Spotify, I welcome your input, tips, suggestions and/or recommendations! Thanks!

Entertainment, Photography

Photomosaic of Socks

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SocksPosterI created a 3-foot posted of Socks for the wall above my desk using 10,000+ photos I had on my PC as the palette.  I created it with Andrea Modaic Professional, then loaded the final image into CorelDraw and printed it as a 3-foot poster on tiled sheets of standard 8.5″ x 11″ paper.  The hardest part was using scissors to trim the proper edges, and align and tape them, but it was fun.  If you’d like to see the actual poster, up close, here’s the actual image, full size.   I gave it the option to NOT re-use any images (but some are burst shots, to they LOOK very similar) and gave it permission to horizontally flip images, but not to rotate them.  And if you’re interested in the rest of the geeky details, here they are:  Socks Mosaic Details

 

News

Software scams, Baitware, Phishing…

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It seems like nearly EVERYTHING you install these days comes with a catch.  You need to be careful not to do an “Automatic” or “Full” install of anything, because they means “go ahead, install everything”, or “go ahead and install whatever you want”, and that will almost always get you in trouble.  Even totally legitimate applications and the big-name software makers will do this now, which makes it very annoying all the way around, and actually ends up getting me more side work….Cleaning up users’ PCs when they slow way down or start getting uncontrollable popups.  This is not a good thing.  Sure, I could always use the work, but I’d rather not have to clean up after these program vomit their garbage all over a customer’s hard drive.  Users have enough problems without adding all this mess, and it only causes them more frustration, sometimes ending with them hating Windows or their computer manufacturer for giving them all of these headaches. Make sure to get a file recovery software to keep all your documents safe.

If you’re careful though, with each and every install and mouse click, you can minimize your chances of having these problems.  It’s the same with the web and junk e-mail.  Be careful what you click one and don’t believe everything you read.  Scams are everywhere.  Anything that ever makes someone a little profit is exploited as much as possible.

Make sure you have an antivirus installed.  But even if you do, these days that’s not enough.  Malware is not considered a virus, so clicking something bad on the web or simply visiting a bad website will often result in malware being installed on your PC.  You need to either run a malware scanner regularly or install one that constantly monitors your PC and catches them immediately.  The latter is usually only available as a paid service, however, usually as a “pro” or “advanced” version of a standard malware scanner.  Keep in mind that all of these, as well, are also used to scam users.  Some malware and viruses appear as popup notices explaining that you’re PC is infected with many bad malware programs or viruses and offer to fix it for you, sometimes for a fee.  This usually results in an even worse infection on your PC, or nothing at all, as they are usually only there to inject themselves deeper into your system, or worse yet, to scam you out of your credit card information, giving you nothing in return as they sell your information to make their money.

Personally, I use Microsoft Security Essentials and Malwarebytes Antimalware.  As of Windows 8, Security Essentials is built in, which is a great step forward.  Many will insist this is only “basic” protection and users need a much better application, or suite, to protect them…usually for a price, of course.  This may very well be.  Just be careful and make absolutely sure you’re choosing a legitimate solution and not just another elaborate scam.  As I said, those are what I use, and I rarely have issues.  They’re both free, though Malwarebytes does have a “pro” version that monitors your PC live just like an antivirus program, and supposedly catches malware before it infects your PC.  I haven’t tried it though, so I can’t say how effective it is or isn’t.

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Doing PC work again

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Ok, I’m back.  Before the end of last year, I had “retired” from doing home PC work.  My full-time job, along with my family and other activities was plenty to keep me busy.  But very recently, my full-time employee forced everyone to go to a 32-hour work week.  Everyone is being forced to take a day off every week.  This hits me hard, especially after having stopped my side jobs completely!  So, I’ve started taking side work again.  If you know of anyone needing PC work (or if you do), I’m available.  Still one of the cheapest prices around ($30/hr), and I have over 25 years of experience.  Phone or Text: (262) 818-6376 – E-mail: service@jimtrottier.com.  More details are in the right sidebar on this site.

 

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Windows 8

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Recently I’ve been playing with Windows 8. I received a new PC recently–completely FREE, actually–as a result of a class action suit against eMachines. I had one–and had a lot of problems with it–so I was included in the suit. It took several years, but finally everyone included in the suit was offered a $365 credit toward a replacement PC. I even thought it was some sort of scam at first–just too good to be true–but after a little research I found out that it was real. I actually STILL didn’t fully believe it, even after I received my claim #, so I made sure I ordered a replacement PC (you had to order from a specific website, using your claim code) that would result in my paying nothing out-of-pocket. So, basically, a PC costing less than $365.

It turned out to be fairly easy, actually. The site offered many refurbished PCs and a few brand new ones, but that only sounded like more trouble, so I decided against that and went with a new one. It’s not quite as powerful as some of the others that were refurbished, but the 1-year manufacturer warranty game me more comfort at this point. There wasn’t much of a brand selection–only Gateway and Acer models–so I went with a Gateway with an AMD processor. Not my top choice–I would have preferred an Intel-based i5 or i7–but those were beyond my $365 limit. I could have paid the difference myself, but still having a little doubt about this being legitimate, I decided against giving them my credit card imformation. I settled on a $329 Gateway PC with Windows 8. AMD Quad-core 2.2GHz processor, 6GB RAM, and a 500GB Hard Drive. With expedited 2-day shipping, my total came to just over $362, so it worked out perfectly. I just wish I could remember the specs and price I paid for my original eMachines PC–it’d be great to compare value versus price from then to now. I really can’t recall any details about it as all, other than the power supply and floppy drive issues I ran into with it.

So now I’m playing with Windows 8, and I think I found the key to surviving it comfortably. The first thing I did, based on several recommendations, was purchase and install “Start8”. This little lightweight app adds the Start menu back to Windows 8, making it “look and feel” just like Windows 7–at least when you start it up and need to find something the “old school” way, like I do. Right now I’m finding all of differences between Windows 8 and 7, and I must say, so far I’m impressed. I don’t think it’s as bad as everyone makes it out to be, and it’s actually quite smooth and easy to use. The whole “Metro Tiles” thing seems kinda silly right now though. But that might be mostly because I’m on a standard monitor without a touchscreen.

I’ll stick with a standard monitor for now, and just see how this plays out. One other thing I’m still trying to get a handle on is multi-tasking. Using the desktop “corners” for specific features feels odd, especially for switching between apps and searching for things without using the Start button. I can understand not wanting to waste a single pixel of screen real estate though, so maybe I’ll warm up to it. For now, again probably because I’m not using a touchscreen, the good ole ALT-TAB works just fine like it always did for switching between apps and windows.

My primary complaint at this point is only with closing apps. It’s really a pain to close apps in Windows 8! WHY!?!?!? It’s something that should be as simple at pressing a big “X” icon, even with the new Metro crap. Why waste all the memory on leaving something running that you’re not going to use?? I know, I know, apps will close eventually on their own if not used, but aren’t they still consuming a little energy and CPU? Why not be as “green” as possible and allow users to easily close them out??

Photography

Camera & Eye-Fi Review – Sony DSC-HX20V with Eye-Fi Pro X2 16GB

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I got this camera for my 50th birthday this month. So far, it’s nothing short of great. And after reading about the Eye-Fi card, and how it works, I immediately ordered one to use with the new camera. The 18.2 MP photos are great, and the 20x (40x digital) really is nice too. I’ve been using the “i+ Superior Auto” mode, which is new for me. What it does is pretty nice: When you take a picture in this mode, depending on the lighting and the image contents, you might hear multiple clicks as the shutter snaps multiple times using various settings. Then it combines all of the images and blends them automatically into one photo, much like HDR. This allows you to take excellent low-light photos that are still crisp and clear with little or no graininess in them. The camera also has built-in GPS tagging (and logging, for recording your journey on a map!) It takes the camera a couple minutes to grab the GPS signal once you turn it on, but from that point on it works great.

Another excellent feature is “iSweep Panorama” mode. This mode allows you to simply click the shutter button and sweep the camera from left to right in one clean motion, either slow or fast. Once you’ve rotated it 180 degrees, your panorama is completed and it displays as a nice, long photo on the screen, at a resolution of 4912×1080 (5mp) in STD mode, 7152×1080 (7.7mp) in WIDE mode, or a whopping 10480×4096 (42.9mp) in HR mode! This is tons better than many other panorama methods I’ve seen cameras (and apps) use, involving stitching of multiple separate photos together, or doing virtually the same thing, but by having you click for each photo, then overlapping them in-camera as you rotate to the next spot, line it up, and click again.

The camera also shoots very nice, full 1080p video, while using image stabilization (optional) and optional zooming, so it’s great for home movie-making as well. It will also shoot 3D photos and 3D panoramas as well as 3D multi-angle images viewable in-camera and on 3D TVs.

The final kicker, which makes this pretty much my “dream” camera, is the addition of a Eye-Fi Pro X2 16GB SDHC card! This is a memory card, used just like a standard SDHC memory card–with one major difference: It has built-in Wifi! When configured (initially, on a PC, with the included SDHC card reader), it will automatically sync all of your photos and videos–as you take them–with your home PC, laptop, or your Android or iPhone! And it can optionally auto-upload to your favorite photo-sharing service like Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, and many others! I will never have to worry about losing any of my photos, because they’re automatically backed up–both on my PC and in my Flickr account in the cloud!

Once I take a photo or two, after about a minute (as long as I keep the camera’s power on) the photos start streaming into my Android phone. It will also optionally GPS-tag the photos from your cell phone. I actually set this option, even though the camera has GPS, because I like to turn the camera on and snap photos quickly, and sometimes I’m done shooting before the GPS ever gets a lock. So with this option on, the GPS from my phone (which is on all the time) is used to tag the photos instead, and it’s fairly accurate all of the time. Once the photos are uploaded to my phone, my phone then uploads them to my preferred backup destination–which is Flickr. You can choose to make them automatically public or private, or only viewable by certain people. I have mine set to private, then later on I can sort through them on Flickr and publish those that I want to share, and delete or keep the rest as I want. This will be great for vacations! I can setup the photo album ahead of time, make it public, then snap all the photos as we travel and everyone gets a live photo feed of our trip! Hopefully it’ll work out much better than EveryTrail, which has pretty much been a flop for our vacations thus far. I can understand having some “dead spots” in very rural places at times, when crossing the country, but for it to just stop working completely when we take just a few photos and never pick up again until we’re at our destination two days later, is simply unacceptable. That’s EveryTrail though, and has nothing to do with Eye-Fi or the camera.

I tried the camera today for a new Ingress Portal Submission, and it worked great. Took a minute to get to my phone, and once the photo was there, I shared it to NIA Super-Ops, gave it a title, and submitted the new portal. The Eye-Fi Pro X2 Android app also has the ability to simply auto-upload photos taken with just your cell phone camera as well, so all of the photos taken with just my cell phone are also automatically uploaded to Flickr and/or my PC just as the camera’s photos are. This is a great bonus because it fully backs up EVERY photo I take, not just those taken with the camera containing the Eye-Fi card.

The only issue I have with using the Eye-Fi card is how I have to leave the camera power on after shooting photos. I have the habit of powering it off immediately after I’m done to save battery. When I do this, it can’t establish a connection to my phone and send the photos to it. Granted it does transfer the photos just fine the next time the power is turned on again, but that makes backups a little less instant, making my photos a little more vulnerable. Once I leave the camera on and the photos finish transferring to the phone, then the camera power shuts itself off automatically. Though, how an Eye-Fi card (which can be used in ANY camera) can control THIS camera like this, I have no idea. Don’t question the magic Jim, just go with it…

Android, Entertainment

Amazing Alex! – a mini review

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Amazing Alex, Rovio’s new game, just came out this morning!  For those who don’t know Rovio, they’re the company who created the wildly successful Angry Birds game and all of its incarnations.  Amazing Alex is their first non-Angry Birds game.  I played several levels of it this morning to check it out.  Do you remember the board game Mousetrap?  Or the old “Incredible Machine” game for the PC?  It’s just like that!  It’s a physics game where you have to setup a chain reaction to accomplish a goal–like getting a basketball to drop into a basket.  I thought they went a bit too far in giving you the answers to many of the early levels just to teach you how to play though.  The entire first section is VERY easy, and it seemed like only the last few levels of it I actually had to think a little on my own to complete.  That’s as far as I went so far though.  I’m guessing (hoping) there are tons more levels to come, each one more complex than the last.  There was also a hint that there’s a level creator in it too, though I haven’t even looked for it yet.  Hopefully they’ve thought of everything and created a whole community sharing element so everyone can share their creations with their friends.  It sounds like it’s the start of another awesome game!  The ad-free version is 99 cents, and worth every penny!
Family News, Internet, News, Technology

PC Support Scam hits close to home

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A good friend of mine was scammed yesterday.  Fortunately, she didn’t allow it to go far enough to give them any money, but they did have some access to her computer.  Someone cold-called her and explained that he is calling everyone using Windows, and said her computer may be infected with viruses.  She asked several more questions, thinking it was someone from Microsoft Windows at first, then eventually found out it was a company called “PC MARV”, a computer support company.  The person identified himself as “Kevin” , and they offered to help her by walking her through executing a few commands which would show her that she has infections, then, as a further step, he gave her a code and had her go to a website, which turned out to be a LogMeIn remote support site, where they took control of her computer to “assist” her in fixing her “problems”.  She was reluctant, but did feel her computer might be infected with something, since it’s been slow lately, and acting erratic, with some things not working right, so she let them look at it after realizing they had taken control of her computer.  (YIKES! ** red flag **)

“Kevin” did several things on her computer to show her the infections.  He brought up dozens of “WARNING!” messages from Windows 7’s event viewer (this is actually nothing unusual, and these occur all the time in the logs–you’ll get them even for even the slightest things, like a website that isn’t accessible) and told her these were all infections that needed to be cleaned up and removed.  He ended up scaring her quite a bit about this, which, I’m sure, was his intention.  The last thing he did was bring up a Command Prompt, enter a command to display hundreds of processes running on her computer, and then he scrolled to the bottom of the page and show her this:
She said it was at the bottom of the page instantly and didn’t appear letter-by-letter as if typed.  I explained to her that the C:\> prompt is just that–a PROMPT.  After that is typed text, and the message “software protection expired..” was pasted into the line by the tech.  He probably copied it from his computer and just pasted it into the command line window.  I explained to her that this text didn’t come from any application or system alert, they just typed the text in to convince her she was infected.   ** another red flag **
She said her neighbor, who is very knowledgeable avbout computers, came over at that point, and she gave the phone to him.  He talked to them, or listened to them a little, then explained that he doesn’t know who they are, and he’s hanging up, then hung up the phone.
I gathered as much information from her as I could at that point.  The person she talked to was “Kevin”, and the tech who remoted to her was “Donnie Adams”, she said.  The company was “PC MARV”, and they gave her their phone number.  “Kevin” had a foreign accent, probably Indian.  I googled “PC MARV” and there definitely is a website which advertises the phone # she had for them.  Based on the details on the site, it sounded like a real PC Tech company that does remote support.  It was well after normal business hours, but I figured I’d call them anyway, and see what happens.  I called and immediately got a live human ( ** yet another red flag **)!
I asked if they had called a friend of mine, <first name omitted>, today, and remoted to her computer to help her.  They said they were having a hard time understanding me every time I asked them a direct question, like “Does your company make it a habit of cold calling people to tell them their computer is infected?” or “How did you get her phone number?”  They asked who we spoke to earlier today when they called.  I said “His name was Kevin”, and the guy said, “ah, yes, Kevin Smith, I’ll get him…” and there’s some muffled rustling and background talking, then “Kevin Smith” comes on the line and explains that they “remoted to our computer, because we are infected with viruses and they need to be cleaned out and removed.”  I asked again, “But how did you get her phone number?”  Then, suddenly he was having a hard time understanding me again.  Go figure.
After being handed back to the guy who answered my call, he asked who remoted to my computer.  I said it was “Donnie Adams”.  So there’s more muffled noise, then I’m talking to Donnie Adams, who basically repeats the same things the other two guys said about her having a virus and they need to clean up her computer.  I told him “Don’t worry about it, we’ll take care of it from here, DON’T CALL HER AGAIN.”  He started arguing again about not understanding (of course) and I hung up on him at that point.
So, it seems this company, which has a full website for their PC tech services, is most likely India-based, or from somewhere outside the US, I’m sure, and routinely calls people, scamming and scaring them into support contracts or supposed one-time fees for their PC cleanup services.  I’m sure they are able to make a lot of money off of people using these techniques.  Pretty much every Windows computer is always going to have “infections” and “vulnerabilities” at any given point in time, that’s just the nature of the beast.  Whether it’s just a bad link that redirects you to an infected website, or a piece of spyware that gathers your browsing preferences, they’re all considered “infections” and “vulnerabilities”.  Her antivirus is always up-to-date, and she scans for malware regularly.  She’s fine.  But I guess, since “technically”, she is “infected”, they can get away with claiming that, but they should absolutely NOT be allowed to continue preying on innocent people like this, with these totally deceptive scare tactics!  What if they had frightened her to the point of having a heart attack??  They don’t know the state of health of the people they’re calling!  Something should definitely be done about them, this just isn’t right.
A quick check of the domain showed the small block of details in this posting (click on it to see it full-sized).   My hunch was correct, it’s based in India… She should have asked if they provide any ON-SITE support!
The big block of details at the end of this posting are the supposed paid services they provide, as listed on their website… Wow, for $50 they’ll basically do nothing for you… How nice of them.  The other big text image shown in this article is the domain registration information for pcmarv.com, found in the public WHOIS database… if it’s even accurate.
Finally, here’s a posting on Microsoft Answers regarding someone else’s experience with the same scammers.  And then there’s this YouTube video from Symantec, when they actually had someone pose as an unsuspecting user who called the scammers for help with her computer.
As a final side note, I’m sure the names they used were fake… Kevin Smith is an American screenwriter, actor, film producer, and director, as well as a popular comic book writer, author, comedian/raconteur, and internet radio personality best recognized by viewers as Silent Bob–though the first and last name is very popular…in the US.  “Donnie Adams” aka Don Adams was an American actor, comedian and director famous for his sitcom “Get Smart” in the late 60’s. –but, again, another popular first and last name in our country… But, then again, if they had identified themselves as “Apu”, “Amir” or “Ahmad”, I’m sure it would raise another red flag more quickly.  I also think, just maybe, as I supposedly spoke to three different people at “PC Marv” who sounded very much alike, maybe I was talking to the same person all three times… I know it sounds a bit far-fetched, but now I’m wondering… If I called them back and asked to speak to “Kevin Johnson” , who remoted to my PC today, would they put Kevin Johnson on the phone?  Since this never happened, and Kevin Johnson is a name I made up, what are the odds that he magically works at PC Marv??
Internet, Photography, Website News

Flickr Backup

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This morning I decided I wanted a create a few photo collages for my website’s header using all of the photos from a specific photo set I have in Flickr–“Swimming at Rosemary’s”.  Since all of these photos were taken on all different dates and years, I didn’t have a single “local” copy of them all in one place, like they are on Flickr–all of my local photos are organized by date taken, and also include all of my “garbage” photos (bad takes, out of focus, etc.)–which are kept for use in photo mosaics when I need them (they make great fillers).  So I set out to find a way to download an entire set of photos from Flickr.  Flickr itself has a lot of options, but this isn’t one of them.

Most utilities of this sort that I found are apps–they’re for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone.  After some searching, I found what I was looking for: FlickrEdit for the PC.  I downloaded it, and it’s not even an installer, just an exe that runs immediately.  It’s very straightfoward and easy to use.  It even connected directly to my Flickr account, only asking for Authorization from Flickr to access my account, which I was already logged into.  Once I accepted, it started loading my thumbnails.  It displays 50 photos per page, so you don’t have to wait for entire sets to load, if you have more than 50 photos in a set.  You can simply select the photos you want to download, or select an entire set, then download it to a specific folder.  It’s pretty quick too–it downloaded my entire “Swimming at Rosemary’s” set (302 photos) all at their original sizes, in about 20 minutes.

FlickrEdit is a really nice app, and it’s a relief to know I now have it available for those times when I need a complete set of photos from my Flickr account, and just knowing there’s a simple method available if I need some disaster recovery of all of my photos some day.  I added a couple new photo collages to my website header, so you’ll probably see them up there once in awhile.  For a few days though, while it’s still super-hot and dry around here, I’m going to leave it on one of them as a static header, just to chill.

News

Movie industry, meet the music industry…Please.

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Who the he** came up with this “Ultraviolet Digital Copy” crap?!?!  It’s the new Digital Copy they included with the last two Harry Potter movies (or the one two-part movie, whichever you prefer).  It SUCKS!  You first have to register with some Ultraviolet website, which then has to be integrated with your Flixster account.  Then, if you manage to get THAT far–which isn’t a walk in the park–you can finally stream your movie using your Flixster app on your device.   Who would want to use yet another app to view a movie they purchased?!?  Not me.

The first thing I did after purchasing the final Harry Potter movie (part 2), was pull out part 1 and try to install the digital copy for Kevin on his iPod.  Guess what?  It expired already.  The expiration date was on the card in the “fine print”.  Nice.  I didn’t activate it on purpose when I got it, since we didn’t even want to watch it until the “complete” movie was out, so we could then watch it beginning-to-end.  Now I was screwed.  I tried to activate it anyway, and all I got (after I jumped through all of the Ultraviolet/Flixster hoops) was a message saying “your disc will arrive in the mail within 2-3 weeks).  Nothing saying it was expired or anything, just that a disc was coming.  I then went to the part 2 and activated that one at least, since it wouldn’t be expired yet.  I jumped through the same stupid hoops, and then got to the goofy decision–do I want to stream it on Flixster or download a copy?  I tried the “download a copy” option, but it requires special software installed on your PC!  What?!?!

I wasn’t about to give up though.  This simply isn’t acceptable.  Who, in their right mind, actually uses this worthless digital copy crap??  All others before this simply had us enter a code in iTunes and the digital copy downloaded–even if they provided a “digital copy disc” in the box, which is another bizarre thing–why the heck is the disc needed if it’s going to download the movie from the web anyway?? But it worked pretty good.  The movie was then in iTunes, instantly available on the iPod for playing.  This is how we want to access ALL of our movies downloaded to the iPod–from the Movies app, which works perfectly fine.  To accomplish this for these two movies, I had to convert the DVD using CloneDVD Mobile & AnyDVD–an awesome set of applications I’ve used on the PC for years.  These two apps work together, with AnyDVD removing the copy protection from the DVD automatically whenever I insert one into my PC, then I use CloneDVD Mobile to convert the unprotected movie into a file.  Once the file is created, I can use it wherever I want.  You can create the file for specific devices, such as the iPod, to make a smaller file size, or create a generic higher-resolution file that’ll play on anything (and looks good on a tablet or PC screen), but it’ll be much larger in size.  For Kevin I simply made smaller iPod-sized movies, then dragged them into iTunes.  I worked out fine, and now all of his movies are still in one place.

Now I’m waiting for some useless disc to arrive in the mail, just wondering how much additional junk mail promotions will be included along with it, as well as how much more junk mail this will add to my postman’s daily delivery.  Wonderful.

When are the movie companies going to realize–just like the music industry did–that they’re punishing their paying customers??? Apple finally eventually removed all of their copy protection from their music (but kept their goofy “registered” music format files for some reason) and now sell everything unprotected, and Amazon sells everything as bare MP3 files, which is awesome.  I can purchase a song or album from Amazon and put it on whatever I want to play it.  THAT’S what I want for my movies too.  If the movie industry would realize this, as the music industry did, I could stop giving my money to SlySoft (maker of AnyDVD and CloneDVD Mobile) and instead spend that money buying more digital movies.

Android, iPhone/iPod Touch

Going Subsonic

Ok, MOG is out.  After a thorough analysis of the app and the service itself, I have decided to drop it.  I have found several services now that offer the same “on-demand” music streaming, all have millions of songs, and offer their own variation of the same features.  These include Rhapsody, Napster, and a few others.  So there really isn’t a lack of this ability available, and they are all around the same price, about $10/month, so they compete fairly evenly.

One of the hitches with MOG (and probably the others as well) is that you can only be logged into one device at a time. Since all of our family’s devices use the same accounts, I set it up on all of them, but if I start MOG on my phone and Kevin happens to be listening to it, Kevin gets bumped off the service, and vice versa. Very annoying. At least one of the other services offer an upgraded tier of $15/month for use on up to 3 devices at once, so at least there’s an option out there, but still pricey.  Also, the MOG app on the Android seems a bit buggy. I often get bumped off of the service when I know Kevin and Sandy aren’t using it, and other times it just stops streaming mysteriously and hangs.

Since I’m a long-time Slacker subscriber, and still am, I’ll stick with it for awhile and see how their on-demand service works when it finally comes out (if ever).  Meanwhile, I’ve discovered an amazing alternative! SUBSONIC! It’s a music streaming server (yes, I said “server” not “service”) that you install on your own computer, and it streams your entire music collection (and much more!) to any of your devices! Since everything is served from your own PC, you don’t have to rely on any other service for your access.  And the price?  Free for 2 weeks, then you have to make one small donation (of any amount) to get a permanent license.  That’s it, and you never pay another fee.  The Android app is free too, and written by the same developer who wrote the Subsonic server itself.  The iPod apps (there are two or three currently available for the iPhone) are around $4.99, but that’s a one-time fee as well.  These were written by other developers, and I think they may support a few other services and/or servers as well as Subsonic.  The one we’re using on our iPods is “Z-Subsonic”.

So Subsonic gives us all full access to everything we have on every device we use, for a total of a few dollars!  It works great, and I have yet to see the apps crash–on any device.  The apps give you a lot of options too–you can adjust the amount of space to reserve for your cache, you can set how many songs to pre-cache, etc., and even subscribe to Podcasts on the server and it handles downloading those automatically and serving them up on your devices.  You can even setup as many user accounts on the server as you want, each with their own restrictions (or full admin freedom), and use those accounts on any device as you want to.

It is really nice (and comforting) to know we can be anywhere–even right at the desk on our home PC serving up the music–and we can drop an iPod into a sound dock and stream any album or playlist we want, instantly.  No more sync’ing, iTunes, or space issues on any of the devices!

Android, iPhone/iPod Touch

The Woz Picks Android to Beat the iPhone

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak thinks Android will eventually beat the iPhone as a mobile-phone platform in much the same way Windows computers squeezed Apple’s market share in the PC market, he said in an interview with a Dutch newspaper.  In an interview with De Telegraaf reporter Alfred Monterie, Wozniak said that Android will become the dominant smartphone platform. He didn’t write off the iPhone completely, however, saying it “has very few weaknesses” and that, “when it comes to quality, iPhone is leading.” While he admitted the quality of Android phones hasn’t been consistent, he championed the platform, saying “Android phones have more features” and that eventually the quality of the experience will match iOS. Full story

Android, iPhone/iPod Touch

Slacker

My latest obsession on the iPod is Slacker Radio (often used when I’m playing Words With Friends). I’ve tried a lot of different radio apps on the iPod. Several of them I liked, but a big feature that I found with Slacker that kept me using it is it’s station caching. Since I use the Touch and not the iPhone, Im not always connected to a network. This alone eliminates the functionality of most radio apps, but with Slacker’s station caching, all I have to do is choose a cached station in Slacker and I can play everything just as if I were connected to a network. It can take several minutes to cache a station, but that’s expecte. From the details I’ve read, Slacker will cache 100 songs for a station initially, and gradually increase the cache as you listen to the station and refresh the cache. They do some nice shuffling in the background apparently, because I can listen to a station over and over and it seems I always hear songs I haven’t heard before, yet I still sometimes hear replays, but most of the time it’s only for songs I’ve “hearted”, which you do when you hear a favorite you like. When you refresh your cached stations (you have to do them all at once, you can’t pick and choose which ones to cache and any given time) it seems to take longest to re-cache stations you’ve listened to since you last cached, so I would guess it’s dumping the songs you’ve banned, adding more new songs, and syncing your listening preferences with the Slacker servers. Every time I visit the website on my PC it shows me everything I’ve listen to, so it certainly “remembers” everything. Other features include many curated stations from Slacker, including a couple of very good Comedy channels (one Explicit, one ‘clean’), search features to find exactly the artists or songs you want to hear, the ability to build your own custom stations, bios, lyrics, and reviews of the songs and artists as you play them, large thumbnail of the current song playing (WHOOHOO! Love it!) and much more. A few of these features only work in “Slacker Plus”, the subscription service, but that’s expected. Since the service is only $4.99 a month (or $3.99 a month if you pay yearly), it’s well worth the price for the features you get, in my opinion. There is also an web version of Slacker, which is actually much easier to use for building custom stations than the iPod is, and fortunately every station and favorite you save immediately appears on both your PC and your iPod, since it saves to your Slacker account itself. They also list many stand-alone digital radio devices that now support Slacker, which is a good indication of their stability as a company. Overall, I highly recommend Slacker as a music streaming service, it ROCKS. Here’s some screenshots of it from my iPod, and here’s the Slacker website

iPhone/iPod Touch

CLZ Movies

Due to my infrequent posting here, I think I’ll start posting a little about one of my favorite iPod apps each week. So, to kick it off, the first one is CLZ Movies from Collectorz.com. I have owned and used Movie Collector for the PC for several years. It allows me to easily catalog all of my DVDs and provides a vast amount of detail for each movie I add. All I have to do to add a movie is type in the title or a portion of it. Movie Collector then grabs everything about it off of the Internet and all I have to do is add my index # to it and any personal information I want, and that’s it. I can print lists of all my movies””with or without images. Kevin prefers them with the images, I prefer them without, simply because it saves ink and makes the complete list seem a lot shorter.

Anyway, the CLZ Movies app ($9.99) is a companion to Movie Collector. CLZ Movies allows you to instantly look up any of your movies and find out everything about them. For Kevin and I, the most important feature is the ability to instantly find out what index number a movie is. We use that number to sort our movies, so with it we can tell right away where a movie is located…IF a particular someone put it back in the proper order, if you know what I mean. It provides both a listing by title (with tiny thumbnail images) or a image-only list that’s kind of fun to fly through, if you like finding movies by their box art. This is Kevin’s favorite way. You can sort the list by title, index #, or year, list them by format (DVD, Blu-Ray, etc.), by genre, etc.

Exporting your list from Movie Collector is very simple and straightforward, and pretty quick, even with hundreds of movies. It’s a pretty simple app, actually, and it works very well. It gives us one more reason to grab the iPod instead of jumping on the computer and loading up Movie Collector just to find one of our movies to watch. I just wish they’d expand the built-in search in the app to include actors, directors, etc., instead of just words in the title of the movie. I’m sure there’ll be updates down the road though, there always are. Oh, and here’s some screenshots:

Family News

MagicJack

I recently took a big risk with our phone service, and switched to MagicJack.  Due to our ever-increasing cost of living, we’ve been looking for ways to cut costs.  Since Sandy and I both have cells phones, I wanted to get rid of our home phone completely and just go with our cell phones only.  Sandy thought differently, however, and thought we should keep our home phone service.  So I looked into our options.  As it was, we were paying $50-$60 per month for our home phone service through McLeodUSA.  $30-$35 of this was for our base services, and the rest was for long distance calls””mostly from me when I’m on-call at work (a Waukegan hospital, which is long distance for us, and their corporate support, which is in Tennessee).  Time-Warner cable-based phone service was an option that would save us some money, especially since it offers free long distance as part of the package.  So that was one option.  AT&T also recently stopped at our door offering their all-in-one package and “U-Verse”, whatever the heck that thing is”¦and this would have been about the same savings overall.  Then I saw this bizarre thing on TV and in a few Internet ads called “MagicJack.”  It certainly couldn’t be for real, so for a long time I dismissed it as just one of those goofy scams, like the “Free Internet TV” applications we always see the ads for.

Well, when yet another even bigger phone bill arrived this month, I decided to look into it further.  I read many reviews of it, looked into application compatibility, and then, based on the price, we decided to just jump right into it.  It’s a flat $39.99 for the box, which includes the first year of service, then it’s $20 per year after that.  So we’re basically talking $20 for the little USB device, and $20 per YEAR for the phone service.  Compare that to the $600 or more per year we were previously paying for our phone service!  Plus, since we picked up the box at Best Buy, we can return it within 14 days for a full refund.  And if you want even more of a deal, just visit the MagicJack website.  There you can order on for free and try it out for 30 days before paying for it.  So after weighing all of the options, we decided to go ahead and switch to it.   We didn’t have anything to lose, and if it works out, we’ll come out way ahead! If I have you drooling now, make sure you read the rest of this posting closely.  There are some caveats and requirements that might not make it an ideal solution for you.  First of all, the only instructions are 3 simple steps on the packaging: 1. Plug your phone into it, 2. Plug it into a USB slot on your PC (or Mac), 3. Pick up your phone and use it.  Sounds pretty simple, and in a perfect world it would be.  But as it turns out, this only applies to Windows XP users.  Vista users are close though.  It won’t work as easy as this on Vista right out of the box–you have to go to their website and download the Vista update and install it to make it work.  Then there’s Windows 7″”which is what I’m using now.  I figured if the update worked for Vista, it should also Apply to 7.  No such luck.  But after some googling, I found a workaround that worked great.  It required a Windows Vista system to complete though””you basically install the software and activate the MagicJack on Vista, then copy all of the configuration to the Windows 7 PC.  After that it works great.  Interestingly, MagicJack Support said that the MagicJack simply will not work on Windows 7 yet.  I can say for sure though, that it does.

Next there’s the requirement of the PC.  It has to be on and available, with the MagicJack software running, in order to be able to make and receive phone calls.   This is no problem for us, we have a main PC that we keep on 24/7 as it is, and it’s fairly new, so it’s fast enough to handle the telephone while still allowing us to use it for all of our usual applications.  We just have to be careful not to reboot when someone’s on the phone, or accidentally close the application.  When the computer isn’t on or it’s unavailable, your calls automatically go to MagicJack voicemail.  This is a nice feature though””it will automatically even e-mail your voicemail messages to you””as .WAV files.  It also includes music on hold (while you’re using call waiting) and 3-way calling, although we haven’t used these features yet.  I did hear the music on hold for several seconds and it was pretty raspy.  But this feature isn’t even mentioned anywhere yet, so I think it’s experimental at this point.

On to call quality:  Call quality depends on your broadband connection.  From what I’ve read, if your upload speed is too low, you won’t be able to make or receive calls.  So my having the “turbo” addon with Time Warner might be making all the difference in the world for us.  We use the Playstation Network, X-Box Live, Digital Cable, as well as the Internet on a daily basis, so believe me, we need the speed boost.  Call quality has been very good so far though.  Calls sound nearly landline quality, and definitely much better than cell phone quality.  I have noticed slight dropouts occasionally, and I experienced one 3-second pause where someone electronically “stuttered” part of a word, but then it resumed the conversion normally after that.  The caller on the other end didn’t even hear it.  Also, just starting a call is sometimes a bit difficult.  You might get a dial tone, dial a number, and nothing””no ring, nothing.  Hang up and call again though, and it works fine.  Just a little glitchy there I guess.

Then there’s a power issue.  The MagicJack box itself is about the size of a cigarette lighter and plugs into a USB port.  If the port is unpowered, or plugged directly into a USB port on a PC, you can often have problems with it rebooting the software, disconnecting your calls, etc.  These problems, however, all seem to be remedied by simply using a powered USB hub.  It MUST be powered too””this is the issue””the MagicJack requires all of the power of a dedicated USB jack.  Fortunately, I was proactive with this, and had a spare powered 8-port D-Link USB hub ready to use with it.  I haven’t experienced this issue at all since we started using it, so I guess the hub works.

Lastly, the phone number problem.  You don’t get to keep your old phone number.  MagicJack doesn’t currently support “porting” of phone numbers to its service.  They plan to offer this feature in the near future, however.  So we had to choose a new number.  You do this when activating your MagicJack, and you are given the option of choosing from the available prefixes available within your area code.  The 4-digits after the prefix, however, are automatically generated.  For us, in the 262 area code, the only available prefixes were in the Thiensville area, so even our next door neighbors have to call long distance (if THEIR phone service doesn’t include extended-range local calling) in order to call us.  A bit of a bummer, but when you think about it, everyone’s phone service is evolving anyway, so there are probably few people left still paying extra for “extended area” calling beyond this distance. (Thiensville is actually 57 miles North of us).

I think that’s about it though.  If you can handle all of the “catches” involved, this could be a viable solution for you.  I think it’s going to be fine for us.  Having an excellent Internet connection helps a lot though, I’m sure.  And if there’s just too many catches for you to be comfortable with switching to it, keep it in the back of your mind for awhile.  Based on previous history, the service and support for MagicJack is getting better all the time.  They’re bound to improve the device as well as the phone service and it’s features in the near future, especially support for Windows 7 after it is officially released in October.  I think I can handle the issues and make this thing worth the $600 we’ll save each year.