Slashdot Mirror

Missing from list: the Bantam BA50 mp3 player. The buttons are cheap and poorly labelled, the MP3's play with a loud hiss. Worst of all, the thing looks like the torso of the Lost in Space movie robot. I think they recycled these from unsold movie tie-in toys. If this trend continues, look for thumb-drives built into unsold "Battlefield Earth" Terl action figures. Oh, almost forgot. It looks embarassingly bad. Don't want to be seen in public with it!

The Merlin Roadster is also a three wheel drive, but not as ugly and has an ICE. A mini review is here.

• It plays MP3 (VBR/CBR) and WMA burned to regular CD-R or CD-RW. No OGG, but then again, very few players do.
• It plays regular CD's! Yes, the kind you buy in a store, or the kind you have to keep around still because it's all your car's CD player supports.
• Storage: As many tracks as you can fit on a CD(-R[W]), which is to say, about 700 MB. That is, between 150-250 songs (my regular playlist is about 50 songs, though I can see how being able to store "only" 250 tracks may be a problem for some people).
• Battery life: 10-15 hours. Well in excess of what most flash or HD-based players can do as reported by this article.
• Media costs: Dirt cheap and easy to replace (CD-RW's are what, $1-$2 apiece?)
• Portability: Not as good as a flash-based player, for obvious reasons. Comparable to one of the larger HD-based players in width, but pretty thin. Fits in most pockets (goes without saying that newer MP3/CD players are smaller). Doesn't weigh much.
• Other: Great sound. Does not crackle up when batteries run low. Headphone and line-out stereo connections. Menu-based interface, lots of options. Upgradeable firmware.

I'd like to know why no one has come up with a decent, washable keyboard.

http://www.inpace.com/flexi.html

http://www.iscdfw.com/onlinecatalog/Keyboards/keyb oard_PalmTop.htm

http://www.2opinion.com/accessories/flexkey.htm

http://www.edgereview.com/ataglance.cfm?category=h andheld&ID=131

http://www.chatability.co.uk/Washable%20Keyboard&M ouse.html

Although I remember a rollable, waterproof keyboard from a while back, I couldn't find the link to their website (that last link is to mine). The above results, however, were from a quick google of "washable keyboard". Geez, you'd think you people had never heard of Google.

In device manager in Windows I could even enable or disable write caching on it. Perhaps the ISD200 (USB to IDE bridge IC) drivers did something right.

Now if there was a CF based player...

Uhhh...

1. Daisy Diva
2. assorted I-Jam players
3. i-Play Moveman
4. Merit MP2000
5. Precom DC-530 (Okay so it's really a camera)
6. Simply Sonic SMP-200D
7. RCA Lyra

Did you even try looking on compactflash.org?

I have to thank you for mentioning the sim locking issue, which I was ignorant of. Not a trivial matter if you're buying a third-party GSM phone!

Unless you have a LAPTOP and want it to have more than one button. Your suggestion isn't really a viable option on a plane, train, bus, or a lot of the many of places people buy laptops so they can use them in.

Making the entire mouse a button means you can't rest your hand on the mouse.

I just pre-ordered my NEX ia a few days ago (it doesn't ship for a few more days; $130 + s/h for a NEX ia + 128MB CF) - my NEX II served me well for two years and just recently died. One neat feature is that it does do 64kbps MP3 recording w/ an internal mic. I was originally looking for a decent MP3 recorder, but unfortunately, one doesn't exist (the only ones that have level meters for example are $1000+ bulky pro units).

Anyway, I posted some research on my blog which might be of interest:

My old NEX II MP3 player just recently died on me. I started taking it apart, and it looks like I might be able to do some soldering to possibly get it working, but chances are slim (approximately corresponding to my soldering skills). It looks like the new NEX ia is coming out though, with voice/FM recording, better firmware, and possible Ogg Vorbis support, among other things. I sent an email to see what the recording quality is (hopefully with line-in capabilities), and to see if some slightly annoying NEX II bugs have been fixed.

From correspondence w/ Frontier Labs:

• improvements: multiple folder support, alphabetical song listing, more buffering, improved shuffle (but no m3u support, so you'll want to keep your CopyNex handy - see also: FATSort, PlaylistExpander)
• Ogg Vorbis is actually being worked on, for the NEX II's as well as the NEX ia and will be released as a firmware upgrade
• 64Kbps recording (can record at higher bitrates, but no selection mechanism in the firmware right now)
• No (recording) level-meter
• No line-in, the only external input is the built-in voice recording microphone
• Can play back MP3 files at the same time as recording

Perception Digital has a PD-095-01 Portable MP3 player which has a can record from an internal mic, FM, or a line-in at 13Kbps voice or 48-320kbps MP3 (!). That's pretty frickin' awesome. It's a little bit on the chunkier side, and only accepts SmartMedia, no Compact Flash though. Still, tempting, if I could find some user reviews...

The e.Digital Odyssey 300 (SmartMedia) looks interesting, although it also looks like it's no longer available. [the Mpio DMB+ looks like the same thing]

Also, PoGo! Products has their RipFlash line of Recordable Digital Audio Players (the TRIO is one w/ mic and line in, but is not memory expandable). Uses SD/MMC... (CNet RipFlash DX review)

See Also: minidisc.org's Portable Recorders with Uploading Facilities list.

Places to buy: e.Digital Odyseey 300, PoGo! RipFlash Trio, Perception Digital Hercules (PD-095-01),

Jay Samit, new media senior vice-president at EMI Recorded Music in Hollywood, explains how it works: 'You're listening to the radio in your car, you love the song but you don't know who it's by. Flick the Keychain and it instantly knows which radio station you're tuned into, and where you are on the planet. It connects to the station, finds out about the track and sends you an e-mail to tell you where you can buy it.

A good description of them with some background and an explanation of how they worked is here. They were never given away but sold for ~US$20 and just didn't catch on, at least never enough to recoup their support costs.

Now gone the way of the iTag, the CueCat and the Modo.

Here's a review

I would hazzard a guess that W2K is doing something at boot that is standing in your way since it was pretty straightforward to get this up and running under X and the VESA framebuffer (sure ain't matroxfb though). The monitor will even respond to standard VGA modes as I have access to the bios, etc... If you're losing the screen after the bios hands off to W2K then your card should work with some configuration. The alternate case frankly stumps me unless you have a 3rd party ADC-DVI adapter, though even that possibility is confusing as ADC really is just DVI + USB + power. The pins for each protocol are right there.

There is one hitch to using any Apple monitor (excepting the 22" Cinema Display?) on a non-apple box. You lose control of the backlight so this gorgeous monitor can't be adjusted for brightness and seems to default to 100% on (which is too bright to make true black). I think this is done over VESA's DDC lines and have looked through the PPC Linux kernel sources for a way to do this on i386 but the meat of the matter may be buried in an Apple rom either on the motherboard or the video card. The only tweaking utility I could find on FreshMeat was something called read-edid that can find the monitor's identity but then barfs. Does anyone out there have any code that we could play around with on this subject?

I use an nVidia Quadro4 900XGL to drive a Samsumg T240 (24" HDTV display) under Red Hat 7.2, but with the nVidia kernel drivers.

When we were researching this, it was important to find out whether the DVI interface on the graphics card was really capable of driving 1920x1200 digitally and not just through its analog connectors (DVI-I means integrated DVI-D and DVI-A (analog)), since many smart displays will just fall back onto the analog signal if the digital signal is not there.

IIRC, the fundamental issue was how good the TMDS transmitter was on the video card. It seemed like, very roughly, RAMDAC frequency: analog picture quality, TMDS frequency: digital picture quality. Many topped out at 1280x1024, some were good for 1600x1200, but you had to look very carefully for one capable of 1920x1200. Eg, there were some medical quality image viewing hardware that were quite expensive.

The situation has probably improved over the last 6 months, so you shouldn't have quite so hard a time finding a good video card.

Since the site is gone for the moment, here are some quick links:
Web Site:
www.terapin-mine.com
Purchase:
http://www.thinkgeek.com
Reviews:
http://www.digitaljournalist.org
http://www.edgereview.com
http://computers.cnet.com

Try the Kensington FlyLight. It plugs into the USB port for its power. I love it, and my GF bought one for her boss for xmas, who loves it too.

So far it is the only Windows USB device that has never crashed. :)

EdgeReview did an article on this watch, (it has a nice picture on it, too), here: http://www.edgereview.com/ataglance.cfm?category=i maging&ID=246

The metal-banded WQV3D-8 costs $269, while its companion costs $249.

Is this thing waterproof? Can it take pictures underwater? (I doubt that one).

Having seen stories about robot mowers in the past, I revisited them to see how they accomplish this. This one uses a perimeter wire to tell the mower it's hit the boundary, plus onboard sensors to sense obstacles. Same for this one. I did a number of google searches for robot position sensing and didn't come up with anything that would represent a drop-in solution. Some folks are experimenting with visual clues, others with mathematical means to 'estimate' position (I don't know about you, but no mower of mine is going to figure out where it is by 'estimating'), while others are experimenting with sonar. I suspect that you aren't going to find a commercial product that will allow the accurate positioning you're after, at least not at the price goal you've set. Looks like you'll have to be a pioneer. Good luck.

I've got one of those Intellimouse Explorers (the huge silver ones with the superfluous tail light and like three extra buttons; well, what the hell, here's a http://www.microsoft.com/Mouse/explorer.htm link) and sites that won't let you back out are an incredible annoyance. See, two of the buttons on there serve as Forward/Back (respectively) while browsing the web, and after about 20 minutes of using them, I was hooked. You wouldn't believe how simple (and remarkably intuitive) to navigate with your thumb. Now if I could just find a good use for those buttons in Half-Life... I mean, sure, it's easy enough to hold down the back button and select the page before the offending site, but that would require moving my cursor over six or so linear inches of desktop space. Isn't that just a little bit unreasonable? No? Ah well.