MP3 Players

MP3 players are everywhere these days, and there are many choices of models and brands. Last year I decided to get one, so I began my research. The iPod definitely caught my attention for its beautiful styling and ease of use, and the scroll wheel was rated as the best of any of the systems. I combed through review sites and the iPod consistently was rated the best. The one fatal flaw for me was the battery – iPods do not have user-replaceable batteries. When your battery fails (and it will), you have to send it back to the factory for replacement. This also precludes the possibility of packing an extra battery, which I had found to be a very handy practice with my digital camera.

So the iPod was out. I wanted a 5Gbyte model, so my choices were narrowed to Creative Lab’s Zen Micro, or the iRiver H10. The iRiver featured a color screen for viewing photos, but that wasn’t on my needs list, and the Zen Micro was made by Creative Labs, a much bigger name. So I chose the Zen.

I’ve had the player for a year now, and although it’s not a bad player and it seems well-made, if I knew then what I know now, I would probably have chosen the iPod. The two biggest strokes against the Zen Micro are: device driver support is poor, and accessories are substandard when compared to iPod. I had no trouble setting up the Zen the first time around on my own Windows XP computer, but I didn’t like the included Media Explorer software; I discovered that Windows Media Player works fine with the player, so I dumped the Creative Labs software.

I began ripping music from my CD collection and everything was fine. My girlfriend has an even better CD collection than I do, so whenever I was at her house I ripped her CD’s onto her computer so that I could later add them to my Zen. This was the beginning of my frustration; her computer runs Windows 2000 (an earlier version than XP), and I spent hours trying to install the Zen Micro device drivers for it. There was no mention of this problem on the Creative website, and I couldn’t find any forums where the problem was discussed. After a few icy letters to Creative Labs threatening allegiance with iPod, they finally admitted it was a problem and sent me a CD from Microsoft (figures) along with an apology. You’d think that if the solution is provided by Microsoft, a simple Windows update would take care of it. Shipping a CD seemed a bit archaic.

I have purchased two accessories for my Zen, a set of speakers and an FM transmitter (which allows the Zen to be played through any FM receiver). Both items involve a messy tangle of wires, which is near the top of my list of pet-peeves. The FM transmitter, made by Belkin, is cheap, sounds crappy, needs its own batteries which drain immediately, and has joined my expanding collection of wish-I-hadn’t-bought-it items. The speakers are not bad, but nothing like the iPod offerings, which are made by premium speaker companies Altec Lansing and Bose. Better yet, the iPod docks directly onto the speaker base without any wires, and the iPod recharges while it’s docked - very elegant engineering. I’ve seen the iPod FM transmitter in action, it clips right onto the unit without wires, the sound is great and you’d never know it was an FM broadcast.

I guess there’s a reason that iPod dominates the MP3 market. If you’re considering joining the masses, my advice is to choose an iPod.

How Stereos Have Evolved

In 1978 I bought my first car, a bright red ’72 Dodge Colt GT with white racing stripes painted down either side. I was 18 and I chose the car because even with its puny engine, it could chirp the rear tires when hard-shifted into second gear. The very first accessory I bought for that car was a stereo. It was a Craig Powerplay in-dash player, with auto-reverse and AM/FM receiver - very state-of-the-art at the time – and 8 tracks sucked. The only trouble was that I could not afford, on my Dairy Queen wages, the amplifier or speakers needed to make the stereo really perform. I did, however, have a quality pair of headphones which I had received as a Christmas present, so I fitted a headphone jack into the dashboard of my Colt. Now I could cruise around and listen to my tunes in bliss. No road noise either!

It was an idea ahead of its time; the Sony Walkman was still two years away from its public debut. In ’78 you just didn’t see people in motion wearing headphones, and I got a lot of gaping looks as I drove around. My friends thought it was way-cool.

My point is that this was an age of “Dedicated Listening”. Combining music and an activity was a very new idea, and putting a hi-fi in a car is a good early example of a departure from dedicated listening. Pardon me for getting nostalgic, but the world of music was very different than it is today. Ripping the plastic off a new record album and reading the album cover was almost a religious experience, a feeling strangely absent when bringing home a new CD. I had audiophile friends who would save up and spend $800 just for a turntable; that would be a direct-drive model; belt drive models weren’t accurate enough. Anyone with a reel-to-reel was the envy of us all. One friend spent over $100 just for his speaker cables, which were as thick as my index finger. Oh, but the sound was good. We all would gather in somebody’s smoky basement, fight for that primo La-Z-Boy chair, which was carefully aligned to the speakers for the ideal listening position, then crank the volume and sit there with our eyes closed while the color and richness of the music penetrated to our very bones.

The only place you’d ever find headphones, they’d be attached to a serious hi-fi system, and the only activity you’d observe was the rolling of the next doobie.

Now headphones are everywhere. I recently read in the Globe and Mail that i-Pods and MP3 players have put stereo equipment production practically into extinction. According to the article, sales for individual audio components -- CD players, tuners, etc. - in 1999 exceeded 270,000 units. By the year 2003 that number was reduced to a mere 20,000 units. I guess it all started with Walkmans, but now with the ability to cram 10,000 songs into a something smaller than a pack of cards is just too compelling for most of us. We don’t seem to care that the audio quality isn’t as good (although it is surprisingly good), we are more concerned that we can take it with us. And the idea of “Dedicated Listening” is almost quaint. It seems that today’s listeners are all jogging, riding, skiing, riding the bus, cooking, reading (I’ve never been able to do that), or whatever, we seem to need to be in motion with our tunes.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with any of this, it’s just different than it was in the good old days. I have an MP3 player myself, and next week I’ll tell you all about it, with some tips for deciding which one to buy. And just in case you’re interested, I eventually blew that puny engine in my Dodge Colt, and I swapped in a mighty Chevy V8. My friends thought that was even cooler than the headphones.

LoJack Deals with Stolen Notebook Computers

According to some statistics, more than 600,000 notebook computers were stolen last year in the US. Until recently, any hope of ever getting one’s notebook back was slim to none. But a company called Absolute Software has produced a product called LoJack which provides an ingenious way to track the movement of a stolen notebook. Once installed, all the owner has to do is register the product, then if his notebook is stolen, he calls both the police and Absolute software. The way it works, LoJack will silently broadcast its IP address back to the Absolute Software company whenever it is plugged into a network, and Absolute Software always knows when the notebook is moved to a different location. The registered MAC address (all computers have a unique MAC address) will always pass unless it is reported stolen. But if the notebook is stolen, Absolute will red-flag the MAC address and Absolute can now trace the computer to whatever network IP address the thief has plugged it into. Then it’s just a matter of the police tracing the notebook back to the network IP address. The company has made the product so invisible that even a reformat of the computer cannot erase the utility, as it installs itself onto a hidden partition and is very difficult to detect or uninstall without the correct pass codes. According to their website, notebooks running the LoJack product have a 90% recovery rate.

It used to be that watching the evolution of computers meant watching the CPU clock speeds getting faster, watching the RAM and Hard-disk size and speeds getting bigger, and the video cards getting better and better. Clock speed seems to be getting less important as we start to see Dual Core chips appearing on the landscape. Dual Core chips will take over from the dual CPU motherboard market, as the new design has two microprocessors pressed into a single package. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), arch-rival to Intel, has produced a Dual Core chip with a clock speed of only 2.2 Ghz which outperforms the equivalent Intel Dual Core chip, even though the Intel product runs at a much speedier 3.2 Ghz clock speed, according to benchmarking tests performed by Maximum PC magazine. Intel, once the undisputed leader in CPU and chipset manufacturing for home and office computers, must be getting worried; AMD has now captured roughly half the world CPU market for personal computers.

Mozilla Firefox, a web-browser alternative to Internet Explorer, has risen to second place as the most popular web-browser in the world, capturing 8.65% of the world market. Microsoft probably isn’t getting worried yet, as they still own 85%. Other browsers include Netscape (once the dominant browser) and Opera. It’s not a bad idea to use one of these free browsers instead of Explorer as your primary browser, because Explorer is notoriously susceptible to security attacks, allowing Spyware infections and other troubles. The reason is VBScripts (written in MS Visual Basic) and MS ActiveX controls, which are widely exploited by those who actually write spyware programs. Firefox, Netscape and Opera don’t use these languages, and therefore are less susceptible to spyware infections. But Internet Explorer is still the only browser that will work on some sites, so go ahead and delete the shortcut on your desktop, but you will still need Explorer for some web tasks.

Bluetooth Technology Examined

Let’s take a look at Bluetooth technology. Most if us have heard of it, many of us have it in our cell phones, and my guess is that most of us don’t know how to use it, or just don’t bother.

The most obvious and widely seen applications of Bluetooth are those hands-free headsets used as companions to cell phones. Just clip on the fancy earpiece with the eerie blinking blue light, and it becomes possible to leave one’s cell phone in one’s pocket permanently. If it rings, just say hello into the Bluetooth earpiece and away you go with your conversation. It can be confusing for those around you, because all they can see is that suddenly you are having an animated conversation with yourself. I have acquaintances that use it all the time and they say it’s indispensable, though personally I don’t find un-flipping my flip phone all that inconvenient.

After doing some reading in one of my favorite guy magazines (not what you’re thinking, I’m talking Popular Mechanics), I have discovered that the Bluetooth headset is one of the more mundane Bluetooth technologies available.

Anyone buying a new car today with a trim level beyond basic is almost certainly buying a Bluetooth-enabled car. Similar to the Bluetooth headset, it removes the hassle of actually having to reach for one’s cell phone; instead, just push a button on the steering wheel and the 46 speaker stereo system switches to phone mode and one now has a hands-free phone, emanating from all 46 speakers (so forget about having a private conversation). Actually this makes a lot of sense for road safety – if you have a cigarette going in one hand and burger in the other, you can still answer your phone without dropping the burger in your lap.

Another interesting item I found in Popular Mechanics is the use of Bluetooth to keep your car tires inflated. Apparently there is a mandate for car manufacturers to equip all their models with tire pressure monitoring capabilities for units produced after 2006. The Pirelli tire company has come up with a solution for drivers with older cars – Bluetooth tire valves. This $200 set of valves will send a text message to your cell phone (via Bluetooth) whenever the air pressure in the tires gets too low. It’s true – go ahead and google.

The most bizarre use of Bluetooth that I have come across is the phenomenon of Toothing; originally it was a media hoax claiming that Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones were being used to arrange sexual encounters. It quickly moved from being a hoax to a reality. If you happen to be in a bar in London and you get a text message on your phone with the subject, “Toothing?”, that means somebody with a Bluetooth phone, who is in the same bar as you, finds you attractive and wants to have sex with you. It is up to you to figure out who it is, but it’s most probably the person staring at you maniacally from across the bar. How that person knows it’s your phone they’re sending to I haven’t really figured out yet, but I didn’t understand Speed Dating at first either.

Just when you think you’ve seen it all, something else whacks you on the side of the head. Welcome to the New Millenium!