Review: Garmin Tempe Sensor

The Garmin Vivoactive HR has every sensor the Edge 800 or Fenix 3 HR has except for the temperature sensor. I'm sure some of it is cost cutting (though it's probably measured in the cents) but some of it is also practical: a device on your wrist is going to end up measuring your wrist's temperature, which hopefully is somewhere around 98.6F. That's not very useful, however!

The solution is the Garmin Tempe sensor. The device was actually created for the Fenix series of Garmin outdoor watches, since a temperature sensor really should be away from your body. It works and pairs with the Vivoactive with no problem, and if you plan to only record temperatures for your bike rides, you can just leave it on your bike (I stuff it into my handlebar bag) and then it's a "pair and forget" device. On my bike rides, it never takes longer than about a minute before the Vivoactive picks it up and it records the temperatures on nice graphs. It takes about 3 minutes for it to come down to ambient temperature from my indoor bike parking area, which is not an issue --- you can actually see in most cases that the indoor bike parking is colder than the ambient temperature, since on a cold day I tend to want to ride in sunny places.

If you want to take the device on a hike, the clip it comes in works on belt loops. Note that it doesn't actually work on belts. It's not big enough or long enough to go around a broad/tall belt, but it's just the right size to go on a belt loop and stay on all day even when switching from cycling to hiking and vice-versa. The tough part is to remember to take it off your pants before sticking the pants into the laundry!

The $25 question is whether the Garmin unit uses it to correct elevation/altitude data. I don't know, and have no easy way to figure it out short of taking it to the Alps and climbing a few marked passes with accurate elevation signs back to back. While I'm happy to do that, it'll take awhile for me to get to it. I know that on stable weather days, the Edge 800 (with the built in temperature sensor and barometer) is easily accurate within 5 meters. I'd love to see if the Vivoactive HR can also achieve that.

In a nice touch, the device uses the same battery (CR2032) as all other Garmin sensor units. That means you can expect long life and you only need to stock one type of backup batteries and it'll work with all your sensors.

In any case, it's cheap, light, easy to carry (and automatically pairs). It's unobtrusive in use. It's certainly not essential, but it's fun to go back and say, "Oh that's why it felt so cold!" Recommended.

Review: Snapcircuits Rover

Bowen liked the Snapcircuits Arcade kit so much that there are days when he wakes up at 6:00am and asks to do projects. So when the Snapcircuits Rover went on sale during Black Friday my wife and I picked it up.

The concept is fairly similar: you get a breadboard that's mounted onto a chassis. The chassis contains the batteries, wheels, motors, but none of the electronics that you then wire together to put together a remote control vehicle. The remote is a simple flimsy remote that's fixed function, by contrast.

The problem with the rover, however, is that it's of very limited variation. The wireless module and the control modules are two very big blocks that are connected by a bunch of resistors. In fact, as long as you want to receive signals from the controller and move the rover, you don't have any choice but to wire up these two big blocks a certain way. The problem then is that you don't have much space left on the breadboard for much else. Thus, the kit comes with 3 rover variations, and all the other projects basically treats the rover as a fixed unit supplying the power. Worse, the manual states that your other Snapcircuit kits (save a few exceptions) cannot be used on this circuit board because the voltage and power draws are different.

If I were the designer of the system, I would have fused the wireless and control modules together into one block, eliminating the need to take up so much space on the board. Furthermore, I'd also include a voltage stepper so that the rover would be compatible with other Snapcircuit kits.

As it is, the Rover sounds great, but is so limited that Bowen basically never played with it again after one night. I returned the toy to Amazon and he didn't even notice!

Not recommended.

Review: Snap Circuits Arcade

I grew up with legos here and there, but never got obsessed with them the way some people did. The dedicated kits that are now popular also fail to ignite my interest, and the times someone gives Bowen one of those kits it invariably results in me assembling it for him.

Over the Thanksgiving holidays there was a sale on the Snap Circuits Arcade Electronics Kit for a reasonably good price. The cover says it's for kids 8 and up, but various reviews said that a 5 year old would still get good value out of it if an adult helped, so I jumped on it, despite not having ever played with electronics as a kid.

The box is huge, but most of it is air. There's a bread board, and 35 discrete pieces: a battery holder, a fan (with LED persistence of vision output!), a microcontroller (already preprogrammed and not programmable!), a speaker and alarm unit, various resistors, switches, and wires of different lenghts as well as a bunch of jumper cables. Most of the units are quite well built and capable of withstanding a 5-year-old's abuse. The disco lights, however, is a flimsy 2 piece dome and stick set that's very prone to getting lost, unfortunately!

I got out the set and looked at the instructions and resigned myself to having to assemble the circuits for Bowen as he picked projects in the book. To my surprise, that turned out not to be true! He was the one who figured out that I had laid out the bread board upside down (i.e., it's an inside out breadboard, with pegs instead of holes), and then with only a little bit of help, he could assemble the simple circuits and place the jumper cables correctly in the right places!

What's great about the kit is that some of the more complex circuits force you to learn how to debug. If the speaker doesn't work, you know to trace the speaker area to see which part of the circuit hadn't been assembled directly. After watching me do that a few times, Bowen learned to do it himself!

The projects are relatively simple: a dice simulator, a black jack game, a trip-wire alarm, a moisture detector, and some projects that just make noise and light up. Many of the projects are just the same circuit with different programs to run on the micro-controller, so of the 200 projects listed, there are really only about 30-40 circuits that you have to build.

What's not so great:

• The project manual is strictly that, a project manual. It lists projects, circuit boards, and instructions. While there are rudimentary descriptions of the various pieces, there's no guide as to how the inputs are supposed to work. For instance, there's no comprehensive listing of every program available in the microcontroller, nor are the specifications for how the controller sends signals to the speakers for them to play music.
• As mentioned above, some small pieces are easy to lose and a bear to keep track of. Fortunately, there's a web-site that let's you order missing parts.
• The micro-controller should be more programmable than it is. Why isn't there an EPROM in there where I can plug in a micro USB cable and reprogram it?!!

Nevertheless, for the price, it's reasonably fun and teaches the kind of debugging skills that's useful in real life. Recommended.

Review: Amazon Echo

The Amazon Echo was just announced for general availability today, so it's appropriate for me to write a review for our device, which we tested for 2 weeks before somewhat reluctantly packing it up to return to Amazon.

My friend Steve Grimm raved about how it was the closest thing to a Star Trek computer experience that he'd ever had, and to some extent I agree. For me, queries like "What's today's weather" worked perfectly, as did, "Play some music", "Turn it up", "Turn it down", etc. It works way better than Google's voice query (yes, those 7 microphones actually make a huge difference). However, voice recognition didn't work so great for my wife (thick Chinese accent), and surprisingly, it didn't work for Bowen either, who enunciates correctly. This might or might not be a feature, as I can imagine you might not want your child controlling the music. But of course, if it had worked, it would have been huge, since I could off-load all the annoying toddler questions like "Why is the sky blue" to Echo.  (And yes, I tried it and Echo does have a scientifically correct and credible answer)

 I'm well aware that there's a training app you can store, but the payoff wasn't enough for my wife to even bother, and of course, a training app for a 3-year old is worthless.

In any case, other than the occasional query, it mostly got used as a music device. Amazon Prime music is rather comprehensive, but of course, it wasn't complete. You can upload 200 songs up to it, but of course, that's not nearly enough. I wasn't going to pay for online storage of music when my file server is more than adequate, as is Google music.

Ultimately, if music storage was unlimited (e.g., via integration with Google Music), or if it did a better job of voice recognition sans training, I might have kept the device, especially since we paid $99 for it due to being Prime pre-order customers. For a full $180, I'd want it to do quite a bit more.

Nevertheless, if you're not opposed to paying for music storage, or if the device works for your entire household, then it's a very nice speaker system, and decent value for money. It might take Amazon a couple of generations, but I suspect that a device like this will eventually find its way into our home.

And of course, if it takes off, both Google and Apple will have similar devices out. Which I hope it does. I do look forward to the day when interacting via mouse and keyboard would be considered "quaint."

Garmin Live Tracking

The Vivoactive has a cool feature that I didn't realize about in my initial review.  It turns out that you can enable Live Tracking on it.

Why might you want to use Live Tracking? The most common use case is the "concerned spouse." You're going off on a solo bike ride to who knows where, and your spouse says, "What if something happens to you?" Your answer can then be, "I'll turn on Live Tracking. You'll get an e-mail with a link. That link will take you to a map showing where I am, what my progress has been, and that way you don't have to panic if I'm a little late." Another interesting use case is to stick a Live Tracking device on your free range kid while he runs off hiking/cycling/wandering the neighborhood. Of course, that means you'd have to hand him a Garmin-enabled cell phone as well, and he would still have the capability of turning it off. Note that you don't have to buy a dedicated device: you can pay for a subscription to Garmin Fit Android or iOS app instead.

Most of you who are Android users will probably remember when Google Latitude provided much of the same functionality, but nobody used it because (1) it was a massive privacy invasion (2) it was a battery suck. The fact that it requires an explicit e-mail invite and the user has to activate it eliminates (1), and that it depends mostly on your device's battery to power the GPS rather than the phone's makes it easier on (2).

Here's how it works. You go into the Garmin Connect app on your phone. Select "Live Tracking", enter the e-mail address of your concerned one, and then push the "start" button on the Vivoactive. The e-mail goes out immediately, and your progress is hence force updated via your phone's data plan.

There are a few obvious limitations to this. First, if you have no data access, the live track won't update.  That's not a big deal for cycling, since you will almost always have data in populated areas. It is a problem if you're going to go base jumping in Yosemite National Park. Secondly, it does impose a battery drain in that your phone has to update the live track. On my Xperia Z1, it looked like the drain is somewhere around 10% per hour: much less than if I was running GPS on my phone, but still significant, though it looks like my Vivoactive's 10 hour battery life will drain  in much less time than the phone's.

All in all, it's an interesting feature that I will probably make use.

Review: RAVPower 3200mAh external powerbank

I'd come to realize that my RAVPower 10400mAh was really overpowered for daily use. It's great on boats where I need enough power for overnight use, but for day trips, I didn't want to carry something that big. I waited for the 3200mAH pack to drop below $10, and jumped on it. What tipped the difference for me was the LED flashlight that came with it, which ads a level of usefulness when camping.

Unboxing the package, it's way bigger than I expected, about the same length as the 10400mAH battery. It's much lighter and narrower, however, so I can fit it in my pockets and it won't weigh me down. It's sufficient to recharge my Xperia Z1 from about half-full, or my Edge 800 multiple times from empty. Charging time is about two hours, which is surprisingly long but not a big deal for general use.

Recommended.

Review: Vivere Double Hammock with Steel Stand

I've long enjoyed the idea of having a hammock around in the home, but never had any place around to hang it, either in the form of trees, columns. And I'm too lazy (or chicken) to drill holes in the walls or support beams.

When Amazon had a sale on the Vivere Hammock with Stand, I jumped on it. I figured worse comes to worse, I'd return it.

Unpacked, the hammock came with a carrying case, 5 pieces of metal, and a hammock with metal reinforcements on the eyelets. The stand was fairly easy to assemble, and tool-free. Once the hammock was set up, there was no question of returning it, as Bowen immediately decided that it was his! He fell off the hammock a couple of times despite us teaching him how to get in and out of it properly, but after that had no problems whatsoever.

It's unusual nowadays for a toy to hold Bowen's attention for more than a few days, but it's been a couple of weeks and he still guards it jealously, though he occasionally will share it with friends. It's been a great buy and I have no regrets.

Recommended!

My Color Rant

Like 8% of men, I'm color blind. In normal day to day life, this isn't much of a disability. For instance, traffic lights are designed by men, so the red in the light is tinted with yellow, and the green in the light is tinted with blue, so the difference in the colors are very very distinctive. The same goes for lights for entering and leaving ports.

In recent years, the most annoying color-sensitive objects are those designed for the general consumers by UI designers who don't know any better. In particular, those devices that are not designed for use by men tend are the greatest offenders.

Take, for instance, Canon's digital cameras. The S90 was clearly designed by a person sensitive to color blindness. The charger had 2 LEDs: one for charging, one for charged. Even if you were color blind, you could use the position of the lit light to tell when a battery had been charged. My Makita power tools and the Canon 5DMk2 (and other professional series cameras) are also designed correctly. Rather than depend on color, the chargers blink while charging and become steady when charged. Note that making devices that the color blind can use in no way makes the experience worse for those who are not color blind!

By contrast, the Canon S100 was not designed by the same people. Instead of 2 LEDs, it was designed to have only 1 LED. That flipped from red to green when charged. And of course, there was no way for me to tell when the battery is charged, which drives me bonkers. Countless cell phones have the same issue (though to my relief, the Sony Xperia Z1's charged indicator flips between red and blue instead of red and green, which is at least usable by me, though not by a mono-chromat). And of course, web-sites that use red and green are also similarly annoying.

Do industrial design schools or UI design classes in schools not have disabilities/color-blindness studies as part of their curriculum? Or do those designers just not care? How can even one company like Canon have such completely disparate policies for products in the same product line?

Returning to the Xperia Z1

I broke my Xperia Z1 in mid December, and shipped it back to Sony for a warranty repair. Not knowing if I was going to ever get it back (Sony once hung on to one of my RMAs for over a year!), I bought a Lumia 635. Then last week, Sony finally sent me back a new (complete with box) Xperia Z1 6906, which wasn't the same as the 6903 which I had purchased. The difference is that the 6906 will handle LTE in the US, while the 6903 model has a few bands that are more frequently used outside the US. Since you're going to be restricted to 2G outside the US if you're mostly on T-mobile anyway, this was actually an improvement for me.

A few things that I miss between the Z1 vs the Lumia 635:

• The Lumia 635 has phenomenal battery life. It's a weaker phone with a smaller screen, so I wasn't tempted to use it as much, but with the Xperia Z1, I turned on all the stamina mode features of the Z1 this time around, and have to get into the habit of keeping the phone charged the whole time. The day I didn't do that, battery life was abysmal.
• The smaller Lumia 635 and the fact that it's cheaper meant that the fitness tracking feature was actually useful. I could stick it in any pocket, and didn't really care if I was going to sit on it. There's a lot to be said for having a phone so cheap that I could buy 6 of it for the price of the Z1. The compactness can be solved by buying a compact Z series phone, but you can't solve for cheapness any other way than by spending less.

But there are also many reasons to be relieved to get the Z1 back:

• That nice big screen is really sweet. When using it to shop on Amazon, or use Feedly, I never felt cramped or constrained.
• Apps. It's funny how Outlook is much better on Android than on Windows Phone. This is because Microsoft bought Accompli, but it's still nice. Similarly, I had to pay for Phonly (a view into Feedly) but Feedly on Android was free. People frequently say that having a forked Android store in the form of the Amazon App store hurts the Android ecosystem, but I disagree. Having 2 stores to shop from creates competition, which means that overall prices are lower for apps, and Amazon frequently gives me discounts or free coins to buy apps with. What this means is that apps I might have had to pay for on Windows such as Plex are essentially free on Android. Even  better, because the Amazon appstore is not tied to a Google account the way the Google Play app store is, my wife gets those apps for free too!
• That camera on the Z1 is just amazing for a smart phone camera. Enough said. As a matter of fact, together with the IP58 waterproofing rating that's the reason to get a Z series smartphone.
• Waterproofing: lots of people claim that they don't see this as a key feature. The first time you rinse off the phone casually to get rid of fingerprints, etc., everyone else in the room goes, woah, you can do that?
• Power. Smartphone processors simply haven't been improving as rapidly over the last few years, so the Z1 is still within striking distance of current flagship phone performance. This is no big deal for typical reading e-mail, checking RSS feed, etc., as the 635 shows, but for photo editing and processing videos, it's nice to be able to do this without having to resort to a desktop or a laptop.

All in all, after several months of using the Z1 and comparing it against the 635, I will admit that the improvements over the cheaper phone is probably justified, but requires surprising numbers of tweaks (e.g., to power management) to get there.

The current model Xperia Z3 Compact and Z3 phones reportedly do not suffer from the power management tweaking required to get decent battery life. They do, however, come at a much higher price ($476 and $575 are the current Amazon.com prices), which mean that they're not as immediately a no-brainer compared to the Nexus 5 as the Z1/Z1 compact are. However, since the Nexus 5 is no longer easily available, and the nearest comparable is the Moto X ($399.99), compared to those phones, the Xperia Z3 series would be a no-brainer.

Review: HP Stream 7 Tablet

A fall from the couch destroyed the screen of our 2 year old Nexus 10. You can't easily repair tablets, so we needed a replacement. Our household's been moving away from Android tablets in recent years: compared to Windows tablets, they offer poor value, and more saliently, you simply can't use Amazon Instant Video on them, which is where most of our video consumption comes from, since we are Amazon Prime customers and are not about  to pay for video from any other source any time soon. Amazon's Fire tablets are similarly non-contenders because they offer a poor experience for YouTube.

If you were to tell me 4 years ago that the tablet-specific OSes such as Android would perform less well than a version of Windows on low-memory machines, I'd have laughed at you. Microsoft has a well-deserved reputation for writing bloatware that expands to eat all available CPU, memory, and storage resources. The funny thing is that on small memory machines now, Windows 8.1 rules! The OS is tight, the OS is optimized for tablets use, and having a real web-browser (Internet Explorer) that's been improved by years of competition with Chrome means that you don't need dedicated apps to visit YouTube, use Amazon Instant Video, or even use Google Play services.

The HP Stream 7 tablet comes with 1GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. Windows chews up 16GB of the storage, so you're left with about 10-15GB of storage. I was skeptical about the 1GB of RAM, but in reality, the only difference between this and the Dell Venue 8 Pro for web-browsing is that the Dell can support 2 logins at once while the HP Stream 7 will log you out one user before logging in another. The kicker is the price: while the Dell Venue 8 Pro costs around $200, we picked up the HP Stream 7 for $75. If you're familiar at all with the tablet market place, $75 on Android gets you a badly designed product: no-name Chinese tablets with 8GB of storage, dual core CPUs, and 800x400 screens. And of course, over at the Apple side, $75 won't even buy you upgraded storage on any of their products!

The Stream 7, by contrast, comes with a 1280x800 screen, a quad core Atom Bay Trail CPU, and bluetooth.  It even has a microSD card slot for additional storage! This is an amazing value by any measure. What's more, the tablet lives up to the specs. It's fast, snappy, and could run Office. The signature edition we bought comes with an Office 365 Personal subscription for 1 year, which is a $70 value. What's more, if you talked to Microsoft support, for $99, you can turn it into a 2 year Office 365 Home subscription, which gives you 5 users, and 1TB of cloud storage  Contrast this with Google's $120/year for 1 user, and you can see that Microsoft is really working hard for your business.

The tablet does have nits: the headphone jack is reportedly unusable for most relegating you to using Bluetooth for sound (not the worst thing in the world). There's screen bleed (but no big deal), there battery's small so it'll only last for 8 hours, and the tablet's heavy for it's size. The cameras built into the device are crappy (no surprise: 2MP isn't going to get you decent results even if you're a heavy instagram user). But none of that detracts from the amazing value that this tablet represents.

With Google seemingly exiting the low cost Android tablet market (no new Nexus 7 this year, and the Nexus 9 is priced like an Apple product), it's very clear that Microsoft is going to dominate the low-end tablet market. My biggest wish is for them to succeed so wildly that Google and other vendors take note and start paying attention to this market again.

In any case, this tablet is highly recommended.

Review: Garmin Vivofit Fitness Tracker

Fitness trackers are strange devices for me. On the one hand, the intended audience is meant for the people who aren't very fit trying to get fit. On the other hand, the casual folks aren't likely to pay the premium those devices charge over simpler pedometers such as the Ozeri Tri-axis. For instance, I can't imagine getting my parents to sync one of those fitness bands to a smartphone, assuming they even owned a smartphone that was compatible.

On top of that, most of these devices either don't have displays, or aren't water-proof, or both! If you're actually fit, and swim, bike, or do anything interesting, none of the Fitbit or smartwatch products are really usable for you.

Well, Garmin's an exception. Garmin's bike computers survive numerous bike tours, rainy rides, and all sorts of abuse I can heap on them. So I can trust Garmin. Indeed, when I first looked at the Garmin Vivofit a year ago, I was impressed. The device is rated for 5 ATM, which means that swimming or snorkeling (provided you're not diving deep) would be ok, but not diving. Yes, watch ratings are very misleading. What caused me to hold off was the insane price of $130. I'm reasonably confident that my daily activity level is high enough that any activity measurement for me falls into the "nice to have" category, rather than "must have."

Fast forward a year, and the price is now much more reasonable, around $70 or so on Amazon. That's still about 5 times the cost of an Ozei pedometer, but unlike those, this can actually be used while swimming and cycling without going crazy. Also, I've already had to return one of the Ozeris which broke, while my track record with Garmin units is usually much better. I also considered the VivoSmart, which is nice in that it syncs with cycling sensors, but at $170, is a bit rich, and also has the problem that unlike the Vivofit, it needs to be charged.

Getting the unit set up is easy enough. Select the strap (it comes in 2 sizes), put the device in, strap it on the wrist (don't forget the clasp protector!), and then put it into pairing mode with your phone after downloading the Garmin connect app. The device will only pair to one user at a time, and if you trade users it resets the device to zero. If you don't have a compatible smartphone, the device comes with a USB dongle that lets a PC sync with the Vivofit. I've tried syncing both on the PC and a smartphone and in both cases it's easy and fast.

Now, you might expect the device to automatically sync, but rather, you need to manually sync your Vivofit every so often. Garmin claims that it'll store up to 2 weeks of data, so in theory you only need to do it every 2 weeks. Unfortunately, on my very second day of syncing I triggered a bug which lost an entire's day activity. Not a big deal as it hasn't happened again, but my advice for you is to sync early and sync often. I'm not sure how frequent syncing would affect battery life, but even if it dropped from the projected 1 year to 6 months it still wouldn't be a major tragedy.

The pedometer part of the device works well. For instance, it tracks steps even if you're pushing a stroller or a shopping cart, which I have expected it not to do. It does a reasonable job of eliminating false positives, though I have noticed it giving me about 20-100 extra steps while driving. The strangest thing is that swimming using the crawl and breast strokes doesn't register, while the backstroke and duck diving do register. Cycling on a smooth flat road with a smooth cadence doesn't register, while hammering with upper body motion or standing up on a climb do register steps. It would have been nice if Garmin would register step-equivalents while swimming, but as I said above, fitness trackers aren't really designed for those of you who are actually fit!

The device pairs with the Garmin Heart Rate monitor, and one nice feature is that if you do have a Garmin bike computer, both the bike computer and the Vivofit will receive the data from the same HRM. This bodes well for the VivoSmart, since you would expect the same would be true of the speed and cadence sensors.

By far the best feature of the Vivofit (and the VivoSmart has the same feature) is the red inactivity bar. If you don't move for an hour or so, the red bar would start to fill up, and you would have to get up and walk for about 200 steps to make that bar go away. This is very  useful even for those of you who are already fit, since it eliminates blocks of inactivity during the day, which has been shown to be fairly harmful to your body. The difference between the Vivofit and the VivoSmart is that the latter will actually vibrate to let you know, while the former needs you to actually glance at it once in a while to notice the red bar. For the $90 difference between the unit and the occasional annoyance with a vibration waking you up in the middle of the night, I'd stay with the Vivofit.

The other functions of the device is that it serves as a watch (but it's not a backlit screen, so you'd still be pulling out your phone at night), provides the date, shows you calories burned, and also provides a goal to keep you walking more and more each day. The goal-setting service is set up for a fairly inactive person, ramping up from 7500 steps per day. It also tracks sleep, but the software and website doesn't provide you with any help in interpreting the sleep data, and it's a bit of a bother to put the device into sleep mode before going to sleep, so my guess is in the long run, this feature wouldn't get used much.

All in all, this (and the Vivosmart) is probably the only fitness tracker you should bother with if you swim, bike, or otherwise use a Garmin HRM. It's robust, waterproof, has ridiculously good battery life, and provides reasonably good functionality. If someone else came out with one that figured out what to do about swimming it'd be even better, but for the moment this is the device to beat. Unfortunately for me, it's not suitable for me (and I don't really need a fitness tracker anyway), so it's going back to Amazon.

Recommended.

First Impressions: Fire TV Stick

As mentioned in the PS4 review, one advantage of the PS4 is that you can use a PS Vita to stream a game while someone else uses the TV to watch live TV or do video streaming. Of course, any games running on the PS4 tend to use the entire CPU and GPU to do anything, so you can't actually stream video on a PS4 while the CPU is in use playing a game. The solution is a Fire TV stick, Chromecast, Roku Stick, or so-forth.

Of the 3, Chromecast requires a phone or tablet, and doesn't really support Amazon Instant Video. Roku is the most versatile, but the most expensive. The kicker for me was when Amazon offered the FireTV Stick at $19 for Prime customers. That got me to buy pre-order it.

Installing the device was a cinch. Plug in the HDMI extender, plug in the Stick, plug in the power supply that's a micro-USB port, and you're done! The device supports Amazon Music, TuneIn, Pandora, and Spotify, as well as playing back Photos and Videos from Amazon's cloud. This is a very nice setup, with the biggest disappointment being that there's no support for DLNA, which is what I actually use at home. There are various apps that claim to support DLNA, but what really happens is that they're really apps for throwing content over from the phone to the stick, rather than a full-on DLNA client, so this doesn't quite make up for the PS4 not being as powerful a media server as the PS3.

The UI is fast, and better yet, you can pair your phone via WiFi to the stick and not have to use the remote for text entry. Voice search even sort of mostly works. Playing an Amazon instant video is smooth and quick, though there's missing support for VUDU.

For me, the biggest problem is that there's no separate sound output, so you can't get surround sound if you the output from the TV downgrades surround to stereo, which is what most non-Sony TVs do.

All in all, the FireTV Stick is a better device than the Chromecast, but not nearly as good as the Roku Stick or standalone players. This is disappointing because from the specifications, the stick is a far more powerful device than any of the other sticks.

All in all, at $19 (cheaper than any of the other sticks by far), it's worth while to have as a backup for the scenario I mentioned in the first paragraph above. At full price, I'd give this a pass.

Trains for Toddlers

Bowen is a train fanatic. He says so himself, and I'm not sure I can disagree. The big problem with train sets is that there's an annoying number of standard, and some of them (but not all), are cross compatible. We ended up with two different non-compatible sets.

The wooden sets are mostly cross-compatible. The best way to get started is to buy the track pieces separately from the trains and the special pieces. That's because if you buy them together, you end up with an extremely expensive set. The best deal on the tracks can be found on Amazon where you get 56 pieces of the track pieces in various configurations for $29. This is much cheaper than the big brands, and more importantly, comes with the male/male and female/female connecting pieces. You cannot beat the price and the quality in my experience has been great. What you want to do is to avoid the kits that come with fragile pieces like railroad crossings. Those will get broken due to the poor packaging that inevitably come with the cut-rate prices.

For the special pieces, you can buy the name brand ones. Even though those are more expensive, they won't be broken easily (either by the child or by shipping). We bought the Brio railroad crossing and he loved it so much that he took it with him to the train station and used it to imitate the real crossings. It was hilarious at first but he never gets tired of doing this so now I'm annoyed.
For the turntable we could get away with the cheap ones because those aren't fragile.

Trains from brand name manufacturers are always expensive. The best thing to do there is to wait for a sale and then pick them up. I first bought a battery powered Salty, but it turned out that he prefers to push the trains around the track himself (or better yet, get daddy or mommy to do it for him), so now I buy the cheaper non powered wooden trains. We haven't gotten around to any of the special overpasses and things like that, but I'm sure the time will come when he's ready for it.

The other non compatible set  we started with were the Take-n-play series. These are quite a bit fancier, but turned out to be far more expensive. We started with the Great Quarry Climb, which has a fun mechanical climbing bit, and great rolldowns as well as a turntable, and then followed up with the Misty Island package. To my surprise, the packages do actually fold up and put away nicely when you're done, and the constrained design means a younger toddler can play with them fairly easily. The little play pieces are also fun. However, you can't buy cheap knock-offs, so you end up with expensive connector sets that aren't comprehensive or satisfying. And forget about railroad crossings and other such fun things. Those don't exist in the Take n play world.

The net result has been that we're likely to expand the wooden sets but unlikely to add to the plastic sets. Or maybe he'll just outgrow playing with trains eventually.

Review: Able Brewing Disk for Aeropress

Steve Grimm raved about the Able Brewing Disk for Aeropress, and I liked the idea of  not using disposable paper filters for each cup of coffee, so I ordered it to try.

First of all, the price is $12.50 per disk on Amazon, which means that compared to paper filters, you'd have to brew 1000+ cups of coffee in order to break even. I'm not sure I'm convinced that the disk will withstand that much brewing, but I'm guessing that heavy drinkers will break even in a year. Secondly, while it's true that not using disposable paper filters is a possibility, it depends on you having a nice place to air dry a tiny disk which wouldn't fit on most drying racks and would be super easy to lose otherwise. So I end up having to dry it with paper towels, which defeats the purpose of not using paper.

Finally, there's the taste. I can't tell the difference between paper and stainless steel. So for me, I think I've hit the point of diminishing returns on coffee taste improvements. I'm starting to get skeptical of those who think that grinding your own coffee is awesome for this reason. Anyway, not recommended. Poor ROI.

Review: Airscape Coffee container

I'm too lazy to grind coffee, so tend to buy Costco's Peet's pre-ground coffee at 36 ounces for $13. But I don't drink more than one cup a day, so I need a way to keep it fresh. I bought an Airscape 64oz container hoping to be able to just drop the entire bag in there and keep it fresh.

To my horror, Costco's coffee is sold by weight, while Airscape's containers are measured by volume. So I actually needed more than 2 Airscape containers if I wanted to store that much, though if I opened the bag and made a few cups of coffee I could get away with just 2.

The coffee container comes in various different colors, and 2 lids. An inner lid pushes down and has a one-way valve eliminating all the air from inside the container, and the outer lid keeps everything inside while still letting you see how much coffee you have left. As a design it looks great. In practice, when you push down on the inner lid, the valve let's some of the coffee grind out along with the air, so if you push down too quickly you can get a fine mist of coffee around the can.

As far as freshness goes, it's great. I'd keep looking for a better solution, however, since I think the inability to let air out without also letting coffee out is a problem. In practice, I think people actually just use these to store beans, which would have that problem. But I'm still too lazy to grind my own coffee. Do people actually think it's worth it to do so?

Review: Magnector X vs E-Prance

The Xperia phones look nice and work as well as I expected, but nightly charging required that you pry off the micro-USB flap and then snap it back on. I was worried about doing that too often causing the loss of water-proofing, so I went looking for a magnetic charging cable that would allow us to let that port stay unmolested most of the time. Since we were using cases, we didn't consider a dock: most of the docks looked like they wouldn't work with the case. This was clearly a missed opportunity for Sony, since an integrated system of case and charging dock would have been preferred.

The #1 search result for magnetic charger on Amazon is the Magnector X. Hailing from Korea, the marketing copy looks great though the price seems high. It comes in a little case with a carrying pouch, and a little nub that connects to a usb cable and then attaches to your phone. The problem? The nub is wide, so the charging pins never makes contact with your phone if your phone is in a case. So we returned it.

The E-PRANCE cable hails from China, has 7 reviews, and doesn't qualify for Amazon prime. It ships direct from Shenzhen, comes through the postal service and takes weeks to deliver. It doesn't appear to have strain relievers on the cable, which means that if you jerk it too hard, it will break. Fortunately, it's a magnetic charging cable, so pulling on the phone means that the charger will just fall off the phone, so the cable shouldn't ever be subject to huge stress. In any case, it's cheaper than the Magnector X. To my relief, the charging end is thin, and easily charges both our phones while they're in their cases. We went ahead and ordered 4 (2 at home, 1 in each car). Recommended.

Xperia Phone Protection Solutions

If there's one thing I learned after buying the Dell Venue 8 Pro, is that you can't buy portable electronics with screens on them without also buying protection. In the 24 hours between that tablet arriving and the case arriving, the screen got scratched. One of the features of the Xperia Ultra Z is that you can write on it with a ballpoint pen or pencil, but color me chicken, I wouldn't do that without adequate screen protection.

The protection we chose this time around are the Illumishield Z1 and Z Ultra protectors. Each package comes in a set of 3, which is good value in case you screw up one or the shields actually wear off. In my experience, by the time the shield wears off you're likely to buy a new phone anyway, but it might help the resell value to install a fresh screen protector. The Z Ultra protector installed easily and ended up with zero bubbles, a first for any of this type that I've used. The Z1 didn't install as well, and had some extra bubbles even after a few days of use. I'm not sure what the difference is, and it could easily be attributed to me screwing it up rather than any fault of the protector. The Z Ultra protector, in particular, installed so well that I cannot tell that the screen has any form of protection on it whatsoever, which is impressive. Highly recommended.

I bought the case for my wife without consulting her, which made me very nervous. Cases for phones are like handbag: the difference between one case or another could make it either a fashion accessory or make you look like a dork. To my relief, the convert thin case looks very nice. Closed, it looks just like a purse or other woman's accessory, rather than a case for what most would consider an extremely geeky product: a high end phablet. One caveat is that the case cuts off access to the SIM card slot (a reasonable decision, since you're unlikely to touch the SIM card once installed), and it's tough to remove the phone from the case, so install the SIM card before installing the phone into the case. The case does allow access to the microSD card, the charging port, and the headphone jack. It even tilts up so you can use the phone in landscape mode while sitting on a desk to watch a movie. Just like a wallet, it also has a few slots for credit cards, though the case is so thin that if you do so you might bulk it up a bit. One disadvantage of the case being tough to remove the phone from is that you're unlikely to want to submerge the case, so you'd avoid swimming with it. But nobody's going to take a case like this inside a swimming pool anyway. In any case,  Xiaoqin liked it. Recommended.

For the Z1, I had a different set of requirements, which included being able to remove the phone from a jersey pocket while cycling and use the camera. That meant that the wallet style case was unacceptable, so I went with the VSTN case instead, which provides some protection if the phone were to fall, while leaving all the ports and the camera shutter button handy. The case never obscures the screen, and also makes the phone easier to grip, but it does make the screen protector essential.

All in all, I'm pleased with this set of accessories.

Review: Sony SBH52

I've had several bluetooth headsets, including the MW600 and the Knivio over the years, but my wife has never showed interest in any of them. They're dorky, hard to pair, and most of the time simply mean one more item to charge instead of saving you any hassle. My wife also dislikes wearing headphones.

The Xperia Z1 Ultra, however, is so big that it's awkward to hold to your head in order to make a phone call, though my wife claims she'll get used to it in time as well. The SBH52, however, looked promising, so I ordered it thinking that I'll send it back if she ends up not using it.

On the website and promotional photos, the SBH52 looks like an unusually big headset, but in reality it's not much bigger than my MW600. What's nice about it is NFC pairing. Until we saw this feature, my wife had never seen NFC as being something useful other than a novelty item for me to play with by using my phone to pay at Whole Foods. You touch the back of the phone to the clip on the SBH52, and pairing and connecting happens automatically, though sometimes (not all the time) the phone pops up an annoying dialog asking you to approve the pairing. (I have no idea why that happens: touching the two items isn't something that would happen by accident, so the engineer/product manager who thought that dialog box was a good idea should be shot!)

The speaker on the SBH52 is loud enough to use as a speaker phone, and my wife seems to prefer using it that way rather than as a handset. The UI to switch between handset and speakerphone is unintuitive, forcing you to actually read the manual, but all in all isn't too bad. You can pair up to two phones with the device. In reality, this feature is less useful than it appears, since you end up being confused about which phone/headset is triggering the phone to ring, and the handset is small enough that it's really a personal device, but if you're the kind of person to carry two phones or a phone and a tablet at the same time I can see how this might be useful.

Standby/Talk time seems about normal for a device of this type. What's interesting is that the phone is water-resistant, though not completely waterproof. That does eliminate the fear of water on the phone, but it also means the charging port is behind a rubber grommet. No big deal, but I wonder when that's going to break off.

There are still minor bugs with the software. At one point NFC pairing got the devices confused and I had to reboot both the phone and the device. That problem went away relatively quickly, but I was still annoyed that such expensive equipment could fail on such a common task.

My wife doesn't like to use headphones, so I have no way to gauge headphone effectiveness. It does sport an FM radio using headphone wires as antenna, which I thought was pretty clever until I discovered that both the Xperia and Xperia Z1 do it as well, so it must be a fairly well-known trick.

In any case, so far my wife has been willing to carry around the headset in addition to her phone, which means that it passes the wife test. Translated into man-speak: "Recommended."

Review: LG 60PB6900 60" 1080p 3D Plasma TV

I don't watch TV much, but I do play video games, and my son streams videos from Amazon Instant Video. My wife and I would watch more movies together if there was an easy way to watch movies without potentially disturbing our son after bedtime. It might be optimistic to think so, but I thought that if we had a separate TV in our bedroom after some remodeling work, we might be able to fulfill that last desire.

With Plasma TVs on the way out, I jumped on a recent Fry's deal to get the LG 60PB6900 3D Plasma TV for $699 and free shipping. While I didn't think that I would use the SmartTV features, one of the long standing complaints my wife had about the current setup was that the Playstation doesn't listen to IR commands, so you'd have to use the Playstation controller in order to turn the Playstation off, even if you could program the universal remote to talk to the playstation through the Nyko PS3 remote.

Plasma TVs have a reputation for having the highest picture quality. In reality, I'm red-green color blind, so it'd be tough for me to tell the difference. Nevertheless, apparently consumer reports rated the LG 60PB6900 the highest of any TV, tied with the Samsung PN60F8500. Since the latter costs over $2300 on Amazon, you can safely say that the LG represents good value. The comparable-in-price Samsung PN60F5300 comes without 3D or Smart TV features, and also has a reputation for buzzing as well as occasional "pink tint" panel issues.

Unboxing the TV and setting it up, it's hard to avoid going "Oh Wow, this is huge". The funny thing is that once the TV is on the wall, you get used to it pretty fast. The same thing happened with my wife and her Xperia Ultra Z. Her first impression was, "This is too big." By her second day, all the other phones just looked small. I'm pretty sure there's no real limit to how big screens can get: until they fill the size of your wall, you'd probably get used to however big they become.

One of the interesting things over the last 5 years is that digital audio outputs have really become the standard after being around for 20 years. That means that my RCA-driven  DRA-295 now needs a D to A converter before getting fed sound from the TV. Fortunately, you can get those fairly cheaply (like the basic one for $12.49, and you'll also need an optical cable), but they do add to the cable clutter in the entertainment system, and another source of power draw.

In any case, I won't review the picture quality, etc. You can geek out over that at AVSForum.com. I'll talk mostly about features that you're likely to try and use but those guys won't. For instance, the Smart TV apps. The interface is a mess. It took me a while to figure out that to get over to YouTube/Amazon Instant video, I should just push the blue button in the middle of the remote labeled "SMART". Once there, it was fairly straightforward to run the apps, enter your user name/password, and get things moving. Coming from the PS3, however, it amazes me how slow the Smart TV app is. I'm guessing the CPU/memory on these TV sets is rather lackluster, since they're not competing based on those specs. Worse, they're subject to occasional stutters and pauses. On occasion, Amazon Instant video will give up and return you to the main menu so you can redo your selection. Fortunately, Amazon Instant Video remembers where you were last, so this was not enough for me to give up on them, since it's nice not to have the PS3 running in addition to the TV, but also so I can program the universal remote so my wife has a prayer of using this thing.

YouTube pairs nicely with our tablets (both the Dell Venue 8 Pro and the Nexus 10 worked just fine), but behaves funny. One video started out looking like a SD video, and then the TV gradually buffered enough content that it suddenly looked like a HD video. Pretty weird. And god help you if you run two tablets at once throwing videos over to the TV. The poor TV gets pretty confused, and so do the tablets. Don't do that.

How about normal TV reception? It's pretty awful. I tried a bunch of local over-the-air channels on my crappy indoor antenna, and none of the channels look good. I have no idea whether this is because of my crappy indoor antenna, or because over-the-air just doesn't have enough bandwidth to put the HD into the HDTV.

Watching Blu-Rays? Amazing. It looks gorgeous. Basically, the PS3 is still the best media player you can find out there, and anything it does to your picture is just perfect. Even with the bigger screen I couldn't find any pixelation artifacts except by standing 2 feet from the TV with my glasses on trying to pixel-peep. Good stuff.

How about 3D. The set doesn't come with 3D glasses, but you can buy the cheap $16 Samsung 3D glasses and they will work with this set. I don't have any 3D movies (yet!) but fortunately, the PS3 had a few games that worked in 3D. I tried Super Stardust HD, Arkham City, and Killzone 3. The 3D looks good, but keep in mind that if you didn't like the game in 2D, you're not going to like it any better in 3D. I'm guessing that would apply to any 3D movies as well. If there are any 3D movies that you like feel free to tell me, since 3D-streaming is effectively still non-existent, and you pretty much have to buy 3D Blu Rays if you want to experience it.

Speaking of games, there's significant input lag with this TV (the display lag database shows it at around 71ms). This is not a great TV to play FPS on, though I'm such a poor FPS player that I might never notice. God of War, however, was fine with this TV as long as I turned on Game Mode.

All in all, for the price I paid (which $125 more than what I paid for the 42" LG 5 years ago), this is a pretty nice set. Recommended.

First Impressions: Xperia Z1, Z Ultra Phones

I impressed by the T-mobile international roaming plan. Coupled that with the fact that if you put a lot of people on a family plan, the costs are as low as what we were getting with Ting, without Ting's minute or data caps, so we made the determination to switch to T-mobile.

In any European country, the switch would be easily done by swapping out SIM cards. In the US, we're stuck buying new phones since the Ting phones are not GSM compliant. I wasn't going to do a lot of shopping, expecting to end up with either Moto G or the Nexus 5, but my wife had gotten used to a large screen Galaxy Note 2, and wasn't going back to a small screen. I thought about getting a Galaxy Note 3, but in the 2 years we'd had the Note 2, we'd had to replace it once for water damage, and I thought we could do better.

I noticed that Sony kept advertising its flagship phones as being waterproof, so a quick check on Amazon brought surprising results. The Xperia Z Ultra sells for $367 on Amazon (and much less if you're willing to buy the international version with no US warranty). In exchange for that (compared to the $349 Nexus 5), you get:

• Much bigger screen (6.4" vs 5")
• Waterproof (IP 58: submersion to 1.5m or 5')
• Bigger battery (3050mAh)
• Writeable with any ballpoint pen or pencil
• No barometer (does anyone use the barometer on the Nexus 5?)
• No flash for the camera
• MicroSD card slot
• Slower updates to the OS

There's a Google Play Edition of the Ultra Z for those who must have OS updates faster, but all the reviews say that stock android is no good for huge screen phones compared to Sony's skinned version, so we didn't consider it. The bigger screen cuts both ways, but if you ever read Chinese, you know how much difference a big screen makes.

That took care of Xiaoqin, but I didn't want the Z Ultra because it wouldn't fit in a cycling jersey pocket. I initially thought about using the travel Nokia 521 I used in Europe, but my mom was going on a trip so took off with it. I thought about buying another 521, but for long term daily use Android is still where the apps are.

The Xperia Z1 sells on Amazon for about $392. Compared with the Nexus 5, you get:

• Waterproof (IP58)
• Bigger battery (3000mAh)
• Better camera (21mp, bigger sensor)
• Slower update for the OS
• No warranty (international version)
• MicroSD card slot
• Dedicated camera shutter button

You can solve the warranty issue by buying the product with a credit card that extends the warranty, though apparently some internet forums claim that Sony would warranty the product anyway.

For me, waterproofing trumps nearly everything else, and the dedicated camera shutter button means I'll be able to shoot from the bike, just like when I'm touring. That's handy. Against that is the possibility of screen cracks, which are apparently as common amongst Xperia users as they are on iPhone users. (For a while I never saw an iPhone without a cracked screen)

In any case, as you can see, the design of the Xperia phones are such that they easily justify their premium over the Nexus 5. The sealed battery is a pain, and I've ranted about it before, but on the other hand, I'd happily take the sealed battery in favor of a waterproof phone. Note that the Samsung Galaxy S5 is also waterproof (IP67) and does have a replaceable battery, indicating that it is possible to engineer a replaceable battery in a waterproof phone. However, the unlocked Galaxy S5 sells for $577.74 on Amazon, making it a non-contender.

First the hardware. The Xperia Z1 is a relatively thick phone, but otherwise looks good to me. People talk about phone design, but it's hard for me to ever get excited about rectangles. The Z Ultra, however, looks great. It's thin, and doesn't feel too heavy even though it's quite a bit heavier than the Z1. Both have great screens. I was worried about the screen because all the reviews claim that if you look at the phone at an off angle it doesn't look as good. In practice, you only use the phone that way if you lay it down on a table while having breakfast, and that's not a situation where you care much about visual fidelity.

The physical buttons on the phone work, but are the weakest part of the package. The power button, for instance, needs to be pressed pretty hard to respond, and the volume rocker and shutter button feels squishy. This seems to be par for the course for phones.

Uncropped, unprocessed, JPG shot by the Xperia Z1

I didn't use cameras much on smart phones prior to the Xperia Z1. They've never been very impressive, and to be honest, the UI on those phones suck. On-screen buttons are worthless when you need to shoot from a bike. The Z1, however, has a decent camera and a dedicated shutter button, so I gave it a shot. I was pleasantly surprised. The shutter button is laggy in that it takes a second or two before the phone wakes up and goes into photo mode, but that's comparable to the shutter lag on even a high end point and shoot such as the Sony RX100.  When you push the shutter, it shoots the picture, which is very nice, and the photos are very acceptable. I would still carry a RX100 on major trips, but for day to day use, it's more than good enough. Shooting from a bike with a phone with any other camera (the Nokia 521's buttons were even worse than the Xperia's) is pretty much impossible but easily executed on this phone after you get used to the form factor. Even 1080p videos look great. The only thing lacking is a RAW mode, but then again, I have no intention of upgrading Lightroom just to process photos taken with a phone camera anyway, so maybe it's just as well.


Note the lack of image stabilization does hurt the video
The flaps covering the USB port, microSD port, and SIM card trays are surprisingly well designed. You can pry them off with your fingers even without nails, and they snap back in place. The micro USB port of course is subject to wear, but Sony has provided a pogo pin slot which I look forward to trying.

Voice calls are a snap and I didn't notice any degradation of quality compared to the Nokia 521 I used prior to this phone. A nice side effect of going back to an Android phone is that Google Voice now works and folks will no longer try to call me back on a non-Google voice #. I'm definitely dreading the day Google kills this service, just like it has killed all the other services that I like and depended on in the past. The Z Ultra, of course, is a huge phone, and you may feel silly holding one to your ear. It certainly does look silly. So much so that Sony made the SBH52 to accompany the Z Ultra so you wouldn't look silly taking calls. On the one hand, it's funny to see a phone come with a mini-handset, on the other hand, the SBH52 is really well designed.

The software is Android 4.4.4. Strangely enough, the Z1 updated over the air, but the Z Ultra asked to be connected to a computer for the update to work. There's a surprisingly little amount of bloatware, though the default Walkman music player is a lot more annoying than Google Play Music. What did surprise me is the usefulness of the Sony SmartConnect app. For instance, my wife's Galaxy Note 2 used to just throw off all sorts of notifications all night, leading us to charge the phone outside the bedroom. With SmartConnect, you can tell the phone to disable notifications while charging between 10pm and 7am, say, and you'll have a blissfully silent phone without the need to re-enable notifications manually when you unplug the phone the next morning. You can also set the phone to automatically play music when you hook it up to headphones, a bluetooth headset (or even a specific bluetooth connection), etc.

The phone does run exceedingly fast, tackling task switching, movie playing, etc, with barely a hiccup. But coming from a Windows phone, I no longer see having a smoothly operating phone as something special. I just expect it from phones. The irony is that Android is now as much a bloated piece of software as Windows was back in the late 1990s, and it is indeed the must-have applications such as Google voice and Digg Reader that have me using it instead of much cheaper and faster alternatives. Microsoft was smart enough not to kill off apps that had its user base hooked, but Google doesn't have such a history.

Here's the interesting thing about screen size. When I tried the phones in the store, it was clear to me that the Ultra Z was too big for cycling jersey pockets, but I thought the Z1 would be big enough for casual use. But when going to a doctor's appointment, for instance, the Z1 just isn't big enough, and I found myself bringing a laptop or Windows tablet in order to compose content, while my wife was happy with her Ultra Z.

So far, my first impressions of the phones are positive. Hopefully, the phone will last long enough for me to take an international trip on in the future, now that I no longer have to buy a separate phone just for an international trip. If Sony keeps this up, its turnaround really might be working.