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?

Health Scare

In late May, on my regular physical, my doctor looked at my family history and decided to do an a1c check.  To my dismay, it came in at 6.1, which meets the clinical definition of pre-diabetes, though just barely. My doctor looked at me and said, "Don't panic. I know I can't tell you to exercise more, but I'm going to have you talk to a nutritionist and we're going to kick this in the butt."

My meeting with the nutritionist needed preparation before hand. For a week or so, I weighed everything I ate and took it down on a spreadsheet. When I met with the nutritionist, she asked for my weight history, and then said that all I really needed to do was to lose about 7 pounds to have a significant effect. (I was 152 pounds) She then gave me a food exchange list and a plan to get my weight down. She also advised what I'd known for years, which was to double up on vegetables and reduce intake of other foods.

I weighed everything I ate for another week to get a feel for what it felt like to get myself at the desired calorie intake level. Once I realized that I should eat until I wasn't feeling hungry any more (as opposed to eating until I was stuffed), ditching the weighing machine was fine. The results were almost immediate, with me losing 2 pounds a week until I started the tour of the alps this year at 145 pounds.

During my tour, my habit of eating less bit me. I didn't realize I wasn't eating enough until the day I rode over the Gavia, when a particularly hearty meal the night before made me climb faster and ride harder and better than I expected, while still feeling hungry by the middle of the day. So I gave up the diet and at everything I saw for the rest of the tour until I reached Zurich at 140 pounds despite all that eating. For the first time, however, I'd lost 5 pounds during a tour and not become weak. I was riding as strong as ever, and my metabolism had sped up.

I expected that I might have trouble coming back into my diet, but it turned out not to be a problem. I kept losing weight until today, when I'm at 135 pounds, which is still 5 pounds more than when I first joined Google way back in 2003. But at 130 pounds back then, I had bone density problems, so I'm not in a hurry to get back to 130 pounds.  Interestingly enough, having lost about 17 pounds has been great for my cycling: I'm climbing faster now than I was in April.

Recently, I did another a1c test and it came back at 5.9, which was low enough that my doctor's office called me and said it was normal. I do intend to keep testing every 3 months to check, but the health scare is in retreat. I'm now optimistic that I can pretty much stay at whatever weight I want, given what I know about nutrition.

You may or may not know this, but Asians get diabetes at much lower weights than Caucasians. As an Asian person, I have to watch my weight far more carefully, and clearly while the average American of my height at 160 pounds is considered "normal", I cannot even approach that weight without health risks. But at least I caught my problem early and know how I can deal with it. For someone with my genetics, forewarned is definitely forearmed.

Review: Tunnel Vision

Tunnel Vision is Aric Davis' follow up to his novel, Nickel Plated. The character of Nickel was so compelling that when I saw it on the Amazon First program, I had to pick it up.

Unlike Nickel Plated, which was told almost entirely from Nickel's point of view, this novel shifts in perspective between Nickel, and the 3rd person perspective of June and Betty, two high school seniors who stumble upon a 15 year old murder of June's aunt Mandy. Mandy was a look-alike for June, and when a group of do-gooders start lobbying for Mandy's self-confessed murderer, June and Betty decide to team up and see if they can dig through to the truth after a case had been closed for 15 years.

The character of Nickel is great, and easily carries the story, and at the start of the novel he comes from a very dark place, having been betrayed by a former business partner and out for revenge. The vicious way he carries out the revenge is very dark for a YA novel, but it was in character. It's the rest of the novel where the transition from an out-for-revenge Nickel to a less extreme personality doesn't make a lot of sense. Sure, there's a budding romance between Nickel and one of the girls, but it happens too quickly and doesn't feel real as a result. In particular, the character of Betty isn't very likeable, and it's hard to believe that Nickel would let her into his life in such a dramatic fashion in the last chapter of the novel.

Nevertheless, this was a quick fun read, and very compelling. I'd pick up the next novel in this series.

Review: Logitech M570 Trackball

After my Google ergonomic review, I switched to the Logitech Trackman wired trackball for my mousing needs. I switched to it everywhere. All the ergonomic studies tell you that this is the best trackball for long-term use. You use the tip of your fingers to maneuver the ball, and your thumb and other fingers to manipulate the buttons. There were several problems with it, however:

1. No scroll wheel. It's a major pain with modern websites.
2. Wired. In particular, ever since I switched to having 2 PCs, the main laptop for most writing work, and the desktop for photo editing and video editing, what I've wanted was a single unifying controller that will let me use the same wired keyboard and mouse simply by moving the unifying controller from one machine to the other.

The obvious solution would be to go for the wireless version of the Trackman. Unfortunately, Logitech in its infinite wisdom and understanding of ergonomics stopped producing it and hence it now costs $300 or more on Amazon.

The Logitech M570, however, still costs a reasonable $30, so I picked one up earlier in the year, intending to return it. Well, 6 months later, and I still haven't returned it, mostly because of the nice scroll wheel. I haven't had any ergonomic problems, but that's probably because my Diablo days are over and my days of intensely mousing on the machine are gone now that I'm mostly using keyboard shortcuts.

I don't know what ergonomics specialists would say, but for my current use, this is perfect. Trackball folks have very limited support, so I'm guessing that if you like a product, you should stock up on it so you have a lifetime supply. But I have a couple of wired Trackmans sitting around just in case this one gives up the ghost, so I'm set for now.

Review: Aeropress

I've been making coffee by using a #4 cone filter inside a stainless steel funnel. But everyone kept talking about how much better coffee could be, and the Aeropress was one of the most mentioned and reviewed tools. At $25 on Amazon, requiring no power and coming with a set of 350 filters (almost enough for a year), I bought one.

The instructions seemed easy enough. Put a filter in, put what seems like an incredible amount of coffee in, pour some luke warm water into the coffee, stir, and then press it out. I tried it, and the first cup of coffee came out strong, but oh wow, also incredibly bitter. So did the second cup. I looked online, since one of the reviews said that the whole point of using something like this was to extract flavor without bitterness, but I wasn't getting the expected results. It turns out that you're supposed to stop before the last foamy bit of coffee gets pressed out of the filter. That's the bitter part. This wasn't part of the printed instructions, or any of the videos I saw on the internet, so I'm glad I searched rather than just sending the Aeropress back.

I tried making a few cups this way, and indeed, the coffee tastes good. It's still stronger, but the bitterness was gone and it tasted very smooth. I was impressed. I didn't think that it was that much of an improvement over the cone filter inside a stainless steel funnel, however, so this morning I gave the Aeropress a pass and went back to that instead, intending to send back the Aeropress if I couldn't tell any difference with the result.

Instead, I got, "Yuck. What's this? Water with coffee flavor?" It does seem like the press did make a huge improvement, and I could no longer go back to the old way of doing things. Hence, I give the Aeropress a recommended rating. Just don't let any of the foam out of the inner tube, or you'll get a very bitter cup.

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.

Review: Geigerrig 1210 Hyrdration Pack

I actually prefer water bottles to hydration packs most of the time. In particular, when cycling, carrying anything on your back is just asking for trouble, and it's makes my back hot and uncomfortable. Hiking is another story. Here, you need a backpack to carry ancillaries anyway, you're upright so the back doesn't get uncomfortable, but it's still hot. Furthermore, hydration packs are hard to clean, difficult to share between people, and end up gunky. I usually end up buying new hydration packs every so often because of this, or just buying hydration pack compatible backpacks and then buying new bladders every so often, which is cheaper but still not ideal. Bottles last me almost a decade, by comparison.

Well, there was a Geigerrig Blowout on Amazon.com, so I snagged a Geigerrig 1200 for $50, about $80 off the usual Amazon price. The reviews were nice, and I was intrigued by the idea that there's a squeeze bulb that could pressurize the bladder, letting me eject a stream of water rather than having to suck on a bite valve. In fact, the motto for Geigerrig was "never suck again."

My first use of the pack was disappointing. It was hard to fill, and I still had to suck on the bite valve, despite pressuring the bladder. On subsequent use, I realized a few things. First, there were quick release buckles on the bladder's pressurization port as well as output ports. That means you could quickly detach the bladder and fill it up from the tap. Not only that, the bladder opens up completely so you could dump ice into it, for instance.

Next, the hydration bladder's pressurization bulb can come off the pressurization port. What this means is that before you pressurize, you must check the bulb's output valved. Otherwise, you risk pumping air from the bulb back into the atmosphere instead of pressuring the bladder. In addition, you have to ensure the valve screw is fully engaged. After doing all this, as promised, a push on the bite valve and you can get a nice stream of water, provided you keep pumping the bulb. Fail to do that, and you're back down to a trickle again, and you might as well just bite down and suck. In fact, biting down and sucking takes a lot less effort than pumping the bladder, so I'm not sure I'd use this feature much. In addition, pressurizing the bladder bloats the backpack a bit, which I feel, and is mildly uncomfortable. This is especially a problem when you've used half the water in the pack, for instance. In a word, this is more marketing than practical, so I suppose if you get into a water pistol fight while hiking, this would be just the bees knees for high capacity.

The rest of the pack is well designed, with lots of pockets, etc. And for the price, it's a nice big pack that can carry a lot of stuff. The bladder is also huge at 100oz of water, well over what I can get away for nowadays.

Do I recommend this pack? For the price I paid, yes. For full price? No way. And discount the value of pressurization. In practice, it's a pain to use. The ability to quickly detach and fill the bladder, however, is quite high, so that's worth paying a slight premium for, as is the ability ot use a dishwasher on the bladder.

Very conditionally recommended.

Fitness Tracking

I'm not a fitness tracking person, nor am I ever willing to spend the kind of money fitness trackers ask for. However, my father had a stroke last year, and one of the therapies involved was simply trying to walk 10,000 steps a day. There was no chance he could use a fitness band, either, but I bought him a pedometer. It was the Ozeri tri-axis pedometer, so that he could wear it around his neck. It's a simple setup: you set the clock on the pedometer, and it resets to zero every morning. If you stop and look at the device, it tells you how many steps it's taken. There are a few other buttons for paging through the last few days of data, but that's it. Simple, easy, and effective. So much so that I bought another for my mom (they come in 2 colors), and then was inspired to try out an ancient pedometer I had sitting in a drawer somewhere by replacing the batteries.

Believe it or not, I bought that in the pre-GPS days to help determine hiking distance. It worked but I never calibrated it enough to be useful in that fashion and abandoned it when GPS units became reasonably priced. It clips to your belt, and counts steps.

One thing that it doesn't work for is cycling. Cycling makes it go crazy with step counts. Another thing that makes it go crazy is Bowen. He saw it and wore it for an hour and the step counts also jumped. In this case, however, I think he actually was taking that many steps! This is one situation where the smartphone app Moves is significantly better, since it knows when you're cycling, driving, running, or walking. But for obvious reasons, I don't always walk around the house with my phone in my pocket, so Moves doesn't capture all the data a pedometer does.

In any case, I didn't bother with any goals for step counts. I just wanted to see how much I was moving each day. In practice, however, wearing a pedometer makes you more willing to run errands like taking the trash out. You're also more likely to deliberately park further if you're driving so you can walk a bit more. That has a significant impact, so I'm less likely to dismiss the fitness tracking craze (though I still wouldn't pay $100+ for one).

In any case, it's fun but I suspect it's also a matter of time before I lose my device or just get tired of wearing it. When that happens I probably won't replace it: I was happy to give up a watch after starting to carry a cell phone, and see no reason to go back.

Windows Phone vs Android: An Ecosystem Comparison

Over the last few months, I've switched from Android to Windows Phone and back again, so while the memory is fresh, let me write down what the differences are.

Both systems work well for the basics: e-mail, web-browsing, texting, and phone calls. What's fascinating to me is how much faster Windows phone is as far as the UI is concerned. Google made a big deal out of Project Butter a while back, but it looks like even the lowest end Windows phone has project butter beat.

What features did I miss most from Android when I was using the Windows phone?

1. Swipe keyboard. It annoyed me to no end to not have a swiping keyboard.
2. Google Voice. It sucked to call out to people and not have my Google voice # show up. Not only did I get people asking me if I'd changed my phone # (no I hadn't please don't call this number), I also had people ignore my phone calls because they thought I was a telemarketer as I was not on their white list due to the new phone #. If there's a single reason to ignore the possibility of using a Windows phone, Google voice is it. (Of course, that means that Google voice is #1 on the chopping block when Google decides to kill another round of projects) I had Google voice's mobile website as a short cut on the Windows phone home page, but somehow whenever I wanted to call anyone, I never got around to using it.
3. Digg Reader. Just like the predecessor, Google Reader, Digg Reader was my #1 use of the Android phone. Unfortunately, there's no Digg Reader that's compatible with the Windows phone, and Digg Reader refuses to accept that Internet Explorer on Windows phone is a real web-browser and insists on denying me access. Disappointing.
4. Moves. Moves got bought by Facebook, so there's a good chance that Moves will eventually show up either as part of a Facebook integration, or Moves would get a Windows phone port. That's a seriously great app, and I'm surprised that Google didn't buy them. Now Facebook not only knows where I am, it knows how I got there, and I'm happy to give it to them because I don't want to buy or charge or wear a real "fitness tracker" device. My phone's good enough.

That's it. Those are the 3 must-have apps for me. Sure, I enjoyed Clash of Clans, and I liked having Google calendar, contacts, etc. But the reality was, the Microsoft equivalents were more than good enough to keep me from missing them. And in all seriousness, I didn't have mind missing out on Moves that much.

By far the biggest problem with the Nokia 521 was that Facebook would fail to post photos from it. I have no idea whether that's because I had too low end a phone, or whether the Facebook app on Windows phone is a second class citizen and is hence buggy as heck. Whatever it is, that was a problem causing me to have to wait for WiFi access to post from my Windows tablet. Did I miss Google+? Not really. Even Arturo noted that his Facebook friends demonstrated much more engagement on the same content than Google+.

OK, what about going from Windows phone to Android? The biggest thing I miss is the longevity of the battery on the Windows phone. I could easily go through a day without worrying much about the battery on my Nokia 521. The Sony Xperia Z1 has a much bigger battery (and better screen), but  the battery life is quite a bit worse. It's quite clear to me that Android has a lot of bloat that simply doesn't exist on the Windows phone. Now to be fair, I run a lot more apps on Android than I do on Windows phone 8, but even when just sitting in my pocket not doing anything the Android phone sucks battery faster. One way to measure the OS overhead as far as battery life is concerned is to compare say, the HTC M8 Windows with the original HTC M8 Android. The M8 Windows beats the Android counterpart in battery life by nearly 7 hours in battery tests (21 hours vs 14 hours), a 50% improvement. This shows that the Android implementation of core system functionality is quite a bit lacking compare with Windows. (It also shows that Microsoft's capable of producing lean fast software if it wants to)

The next feature that I miss most is copy and paste. Android has it, but it's a lousy implementation of long press and tweaking that I can't stand. Windows Phone 8, by comparison, is pure delight. You select the text, then bring up the keyboard and type Control-C, just like at a real computer. It never fails, you can't ever fail to bring up the copy/paste icons (unlike on Android, where sometimes no matter how hard you push, or how long you press, you can't ever bring up the copy/paste icon), and it's consistent from app to app.

The next big thing is offline maps. The Nokia's HERE map and HERE drive implementations are nothing short of amazing. You can search not just for addresses even offline, but point of interests like gas stations and hotels mostly show up as well. This is huge for traveling if you might not have data (which describes all of US national parks). Basically, a Windows phone with the Nokia navigation apps replaces the GPS very nicely. This is such a big deal that I would happily give up everything except Google voice if I could have it on Android as well.

I also miss Microsoft Office, which has an implementation on Windows while missing entirely on Android. The implementation is quite good and more than sufficient for mobile use. While Google Docs is also usable, there's nothing like Microsoft Word for displaying documents written in Word.  Furthermore the default implementation of PDF reader is also much better on Windows phone than Android.

For what it's worth, despite all these advantages, it's clear that Android is the current winner. I am concerned that the pace of improvements on Android seems to be slowing, but hopefully with the new emphasis on low end phones we'll see Android improve dramatically there as well. Competition is good, and while I'm currently an Android user, I certainly wouldn't hesitate to jump ships if a Windows phone fits my needs better.

Review: Far End Gear Short Cord Stereo to Mono earbuds

I try to ride my bike as much as possible for transportation. What that means is that sometimes someone tries to call me during the ride. While I could ignore all calls, sometimes I'm expecting a call or I need to make arrangements in flight. That's what having a bluetooth headset is supposed to be for, in particular, my MW600.

There's only one problem. The headphone wires are long and can easily get tangled with bike parts and are an invitation for my son to play with them while riding. I searched and searched but could not find cheaper short cord headphones than the Far End Gear Short Cord earbuds. These are extremely expensive at $16.95, and you can also buy the stereo version for the same price.

Out of the box, they're fabric-wrapped and look strong. The sound quality isn't the best, but you're not expecting Sennheiser quality for this price. Despite being so short, they do function as antennas for the MW600's radio, albeit with poor indoor reception. They're short enough that I can clip the MW600 to my collar and have just enough cord to reach either of my ears. They can also be looped around my neck and kept handy in case a call comes in (my phone rings) but not block my ears so I can have normal hearing.

You wouldn't want these if you want to listen to music in the gym, for instance, but having short cord headphones is so nice that I'd consider buying the stereo version just for gym use, where the long cords do occasionally tangle and get mixed up with machinery.

I was hesitant to pay the $16.95 price for these, but really shouldn't have. These are more than good enough and a huge improvement over any long cord earbuds. If someone made short cord headphones with great sound quality, I'd be all over them. As it is, for the specific application I have, they're 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: Belkin Conserve Socket

It's rare that personal electronics pay for themselves, but the Belkin Conserve Socket is one of the rare ones. Basically, it's a timer attached to a power socket. You set it for 1/2 hour, 3 hours, or 6 hours, and when you push the button, it activates the power for that amount of time, and drops to 0 current after the time's up. There's also a power strip set up similarly.

The socket's spec'd for 15 amps, but in practice, you can't really max it out or it will burn out and fail. I had one attached to my desktop and the accessory monitors, and after running it for several months it failed (Belkin replaced it under warranty). Conversely, the one attached to the entertainment system's still going strong after several years.

If you do the math and monitor energy with a Kill-A-Watt, what you'll discover is that in typical usage, one of these will pay for themselves in a year at $9.99. That's pretty good, both for the environment and for your wallet.

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.

Review: Cheetah Mounts APTMM2B TV Wall Mount

Bowen had gotten big enough that he could now stand up and push the TV on it's stand. That by itself isn't dangerous, but if he pushed it hard enough and the TV tipped over and fell on him, that's pretty dangerous. The obvious solution, then, is to mount the TV on the wall.

The Cheetah APTMM2B is the #1 best seller in that category on Amazon.com. At $28.69, it's cheap, and comes with a magnetic level, though I ended up having to buy a magnetic stud finder. Furthermore, what the reviews don't tell you is that to complete the mounting of the TV, you'll need a long screw driver, which is $4.99 at Harbor Freight tools or $12.50 at Amazon.

The mount is surprisingly light for having to hold up to 165 pounds of weight and a 65" TV. What it does is to mount directly onto the studs in the wall (hence the stud finder), which bears most of the weight of the TV through the mount. The mount comes in 4 pieces, and you assemble it yourself and then mount onto the studs through the drywall with the provided large screws. When you're ready to mount the TV, you mount the provided brackets onto the back of the TV, attach all the cables and wires you'll need to connect to the TV, and then lift the TV and put it onto the mount. This is a two person job, and it's best that both of you are pretty strong. I tried to do it myself and it exacerbated my back problem last year.  If there's a problem with the angle, you have to take the TV down again, adjust the angle of the brackets, and then put it back on.

When all that is done, you reach back with that long screw driver, and drive the screws back past the lower retaining lip to retain the TV. This last bit isn't important if you don't live in earthquake country, though it does help make the TV darn near impossible to steal. In fact, I don't know if I could remove the TV now that I've gotten on, since it took a good 20 minutes to screw in those screws with that unwieldy long screw driver.

Am I happy with the mount? It works, it flushes nicely with the wall, and it does the job of keeping Bowen from drawing on the TV or knocking it back down. It seems pretty sturdy, and the 42" TV stayed on the wall during the recent earthquake. However, when I wanted to replace the 42" TV with a 60" TV, taking down the TV and putting up the new one was a major pain in the neck, and screwing in the retaining screws at the end was an arduous and frustrating experience, and I'm not going to install any more wires at the back of the TV any more. I'm not sure I would buy this mount again, given these problems. It's more expensive to buy an articulating wall mount even if you don't need the articulating features just for the ease of use when it comes to installing new wires and HDMI thingies, but that might be a better choice.

Not 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.

Review: Pororo Edison Training Chopsticks

It's difficult to train your kid to use silverware in a Chinese household. This isn't because Chinese babies somehow have a harder time using forks, knives and spoons. It's because we give Bowen a fork and spoon and maybe a baby knife, and then sit down and pick up chopsticks to eat. Understandably, he becomes upset and fascinated with chopsticks, thinking that we're denying him cool tools. But the reality is, his training period with silverware would be prolonged by quite a few years if he tried to use chopsticks unaided.

It got to the point where my wife has frequently declared that she'll switch all of us over to forks, knives and spoons so he'll have decent role models, but a lifetime of habits is difficult to break, and we've never quite done it. (If you're used to eating out of a rice bowl, you'll understand: eating with a knife and fork using a bowl is impossible)

During the Tour of the Alps, however, Arturo told me that he learned to use chopsticks using special training chopsticks. I searched on Amazon, and sure enough, up came the Pororo Edison Training Chopsticks. They're $7 online but I'm sure if you went to Daisho or something like that you could buy them for $2 or however much they actually sell them in Japan or Korea.

These are very cute. Cuter than even the picture on Amazon's website depict. Furthermore, they work! Within minutes of fitting the rings on the chopsticks into his fingers, I dropped some vegetables into a bowl and he picked up a piece of cauliflower with the chopsticks and stuck them into his mouth and ate them! He even learned to bite off a small piece at a time and eat them that way. This worked with lettuce, but then when I gave him something difficult to pick up with the chopsticks (some rice), he finally understood and relinquished the chopsticks and picked up the spoon.

These are great and I highly recommend them. You probably need to buy more than a few pairs so you can have a clean pair for every meal.

Reflections on Cycling Skills

My book, Independent Cycle Touring spends a significant portion on cycling skills. When people think of cycling, they mostly consider it a fitness activity: one where the emphasis is on how fast and how hard you can ride. Sure, aerobic capacity is important, and I'd never be one to dismiss the importance of fitness.

The reality, however, is that on the road as well as off-road, cycling is a highly technical sport. In recent years, the kind of fitness approach advocated by books such as the Cyclist's Training Bible and cross-fit type activities has led to an interesting phenomenon: of very strong fit cyclists who cannot handle their bikes and crash in situations that are just slightly technical. In the past, when it took a year or two to get fit enough to climb up to Skyline, by the time you saw a cyclist in the mountains, they were generally good bike handlers. Today, I see lots of cyclists who can't descend safely, many who can't ride safely in a paceline, some who can't start from a grade, and most can't even handle a front-wheel skid. This is endemic of a culture that prizes data, and bike handling skills simply cannot be measured with a stopwatch, GPS, or bragged about on Strava, so many cyclists ignore them.

As a result, you find cyclists who avoid pleasant riding on dirt roads, cycling in the rain, pace-lining, or worse, cyclists who repeatedly ride the same route over and over for fear of trying a new road. It's no wonder that the most popular Garmin GPS is the Garmin Edge 500, a GPS that cannot show you where you are on a map!

I once had a cyclist say to me, "Piaw: I've ridden with you for 6 months, and there's never been a ride where you didn't go off-road." By contrast, someone I know once crashed his bike riding up a driveway because he approached it at an angle and slid out. As far as I can tell,  he never rode his bike again. You cannot get better at technical cycling by staying within your comfort zone. You can only do so by constantly riding in challenging circumstances in order to improve your skills. Doing so can avoid a crash and save you from some pain later!

I don't want to over-emphasize this, since cycling is still by far safer than Motorsports. Arturo said early on in this year's Tour of the Alps that cycling felt dangerous to him, since he was descending mountain passes at speed without wearing armor or a protective roll cage around him. While this is an understandable reaction, it is entirely false. While on a descent you might approach motorcycle speed, that's at most one third of your time spent cycling; for every hour you descend, you have to climb three hours in order to make it to the descent. Most crashes are single-vehicle crashes. Even if you fell off your bike while climbing, your injuries are likely to be minor. Motorcycles and cars, however, move at speed regardless of grade, which makes them a heck of a lot more dangerous because the drivers have to be alert at all times.

Review: DuraAce 7700 Freehub

I recently toured the alps with my DuraAce 7700 freehub. It finished the tour as quiet as it started, but it was an unusually dry tour, with relatively little riding in the rain.  For many years I avoided touring on these hubs on the theory that I wanted to save them from wear. This year, I finally decided to go all out for lightweight and brought these wheels into touring service since they'd operated for quite some time as a "daily driver" in California.

I compared the hub with several other hubs in a previous post, but let me summarize the details. With a wR of 21mm, the hub had the potential to build up the stronger wheels than any other hub on the market. On this, the hub did not disappoint. I've had the wheels since 2006, and they've been ridden hard on and off road. I broke one spoke when my derailleur shifted into the spokes, but other than that, the wheel has not even needed truing despite my recent tour and otherwise daily riding.

Mechanically, however, the hub's not very well sealed. Despite my Campy Chorus front hub being subject to significantly more rain, over the same maintenance interval, the freehub has had more water penetration whenever we took both hubs apart for service. This does not bode well for the long term life of the hub, though unless you damage the race, merely replacing the bearings and overhauling the hub frequently might be more sufficient.

The freehub portion, however, was disappointing. When Cupertino Bike Shop recently overhauled it, the freehub started making a ton of noise. It looked like it was near the end of its life, and none of the usual suppliers for that shop had a replacement part for it. I eventually found an eBay vendor that sold me some new old stock for an outrageous price, but it turns out that Ultegra parts from the same era are also compatible, so that's what I can do in the future.

The biggest impediment to frequent overhauling of the hub, however, is the need for cone wrenches. I do own them, but they're finicky, and make bearing adjustment much tougher than they should be. When I compare them to the Campagnolo front hub's adjustment mechanism, the cone wrenches I have to wield feel primitive and unnecessary.

Why not build new wheels? First of all, the double-butted 15gauge wheelsmith spokes used to build this wheel are no longer available. Secondly, the latest generation 11-speed hubs build weaker wheels, since Shimano was forced to dish the wheel further to accommodate that 11th-speed.

In retrospect, the best Shimano hubset to have built a wheel out of would have been the (also now out of production) Dura ace 7900 rear hub. These hubs were the last of the 10-speed hubs (but were also compatible with 8 and 9 speeds), so were as strong as the 7700, but eliminated the need for cone wrenches, making overhaul easy with just a pair of allen wrenches. Phil has these on his bike, and they were excellent.

In any case, I recognize that a review of the 7700s at this stage is obviously late and obsolete, but it's useful to keep track of what properties of hubs are important for long term maintenance. In any case, these aren't really recommended, though in the light of all the miles I've put on them, I cannot really complain.

Review: The Wolf Among Us, Episodes 3-5

The Wolf Among Us is Telltale Game's point-and-click puzzle adventure set in the world of Fables.  I previously reviewed the first two episodes and enjoyed them. Now that all 5 episodes are out and I've finished them, I thought I'd review them in retrospective.

First of all, many have said (and I agree) that these games don't really work well in episodic format. They're structured very much like a TV show, but TV shows only have a lag between episodes of a week, which isn't enough to get you to forget about the previous episode when you watch the new one. The time lag between these episodes were about 2 months, which was enough for me to need to watch the "what happened previously" entries in order to remember what happened. Luckily for you, if you're reading this, The Wolf Among Us is all out so there's not going to be a lag for you.

I'll confess to being a huge Fables fan. I consider it one of the best written graphic novel series out there today, and if you haven't read them, go do so now, starting with the entire trade paperback collection. The Wolf Among Us is a prequel to the series, so playing the game before reading the comics won't cause any spoilers, but also won't give you the delicious sense of context that the game provides.

Episode 3 was fun, as we discover wheels within wheels and that Crane is a bad guy, but not the mastermind we expected. Episode 4 felt like a filler: short, and full of nothing but build up. The finale made up for all that by providing an exciting fight sequence that finally resolves all my problems with Telltale Game's engine while still providing a satisfying story. The ending drags on for a bit too long, but it does resolve all the loose ends in the plot.

The MSRP of The Wolf Among Us is $29.99. At that price, you'll feel cheated of content. But if you're patient, it will inevitably go on sale for about $5. Anywhere below $10, this is good value and a good story worth picking up and playing.

Recommended.