Review: Kindle Unlimited

During the holiday season, it was possible to get Kindle Unlimited for $5 a month for 6 months. At $10 a month, I wouldn't have gotten value out of it, but at $5/month, it wouldn't take too many books to justify the price of the subscription, so I took a leap of faith and signed up.

What If? was the first book I read on Kindle Unlimited, and it was great, justifying almost a third of the price of the subscription all by itself. But what I discovered was that the real value of Kindle Unlimited is picking up the Kindle Singles that you wouldn't have paid for and read, because those are too expensive for the amount of money they ask for.

For instance, the Playboy Interview of Milton Friedman isn't worth $1, but with a Kindle Unlimited subscription, it's worth reading just to see how much of a crazy guy he was. (And yes, he wasn't all crazy, but he was definitely an extremist, even viewed from the lens of today) I similarly enjoyed the Stephen King interview.

What I did learn is that Kindle Unlimited isn't actually unlimited. It's limited to 10 books (or interviews, whatever you call them). So you can only have a number of these things checked out at once. 10 is big enough that if you have a couple of novels out, you're not going to run through them during the course of a flight or even a week long trip. But if you fill it up with interviews or other Kindle singles, one plane flight might just wipe you out, so you have to plan ahead.

One of the interesting things about Kindle Unlimited is that if you check out the Most Read Books section, you'll discover it's full of romances and YA novels. Which tells you a lot about what the population of people who subscribe to Kindle Unlimited is. The Science Fiction and Business section, by comparison, is very disappointing, though my book of the year, Capital in the Twenty-First Century is available on Kindle Unlimited, and is well worth the read.

Now, there are number of classics available, such as The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, but chances are, you've already read them. But one person's classics is another person's casual reading, so if you missed the Harry Potter series or the Hunger Games series, Kindle Unlimited does give you access to those.

One last genre that's worth pointing out is that the entire Lonely Planet series is available on Kindle Unlimited. Since those books go out of date quickly and the Kindle edition of those books are extremely expensive to buy, it's a very good use of the Kindle Limited edition.

All in all, I think I'll get sufficient value out of the subscription for a 6 month subscription, but I'm unlikely to renew. $5/month seems right for the service, and $10/month seems too much, unless you're one of those who reads 2-3 romance novels a week.

Review: Boyhood

I'm a Richard Linklater fan. Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight were all excellent movies, as intense as any experiences you're likely to get in life. So when I saw that his work this year was Boyhood, I had very high expectations and dug out some time in my wife and my schedule to see it.

In case you missed the hoopla, the movie's gimmick is that it ages the actors in real time. In other words, the movie takes place over a period of 10 years, and the actors met every few years to shoot the next parts of the movie, so all the growing up and aging is done naturally, without need for much make up. This approach makes the movie very natural, and looks as real as a documentary.

Unfortunately, the story is terrible and banal to the extreme. Lots of threads are unresolved, but perhaps the best thing I can say about the movie is that I can use it in the future to show my kids as an example of what a terrible life awaits you if you choose to study useless subjects like psychology and photography instead of say, Computer Science.

For an example of a good movie in this genre, watch My Father's Glory instead. I feel like my hours spent watching Boyhood was wasted instead, and that the critics that praised this movie to the heavens are praising it just to be fashionable.

Managing Storage in the World of Cloud Storage

I was a Google employee when Gmail first launched. At that time, 1GB of e-mail storage was stupendously huge, and you could never use it up. I remember once calculating that the amount of storage Gmail was adding was increasing at such a rate that I could never use it up.

I turned out to be wrong. For one thing, Google has stopped increasing the amount of storage available at 16GB. While that's huge for e-mail, Google made a second move that made that amount of storage too small. It commingled PicasaWeb storage, Google Drive storage, and e-mail storage all in the same place.

While the rest of the world uses crappy cell phone cameras and uploads 1024x768 resolution photographs, I use real cameras and upload full size 10MB photos. This used up storage at a stupendous rate. For a while I was OK, since I was on a legacy storage plan which granted me an additional 20GB of storage at $5/year. But due to a snafu while I was traveling recently, my legacy plan failed to renew and I was stuck being over quota.

Now, I could pay $24/year for 100GB, but seriously? When I could get 5TB Unlimited Storage for $100/year and get Microsoft Office in addition? No thanks. I didn't grow up paying for over-priced products when cheaper alternatives are better. Heck, buying a 4TB hard drive now costs $130, which is a far better deal by any account, and of course, services like SmugMug cost $40/year for unlimited photo storage.

Now, I could just live with not posting any more new photos onto my PicasaWeb account, but being over-quota also meant that I'd stop receiving e-mail, which isn't acceptable. So I set about deleting content from my quota. Oh boy! PicasaWeb gives you no way to find out which albums are using the most storage (or using any storage for that matter, since despite my best efforts I occasionally still use my phone for photos). I also had to be careful with which photos I deleted, since many of my photo albums are linked to by various blog posts.

As a result, I ended up having to delete e-mail. I tried to move e-mail from the cloud to local storage using Thunderbird, but apparently Thunderbird was never designed to handle the kind of volume of e-mail I had using IMAP. It would tell me that it's moved data to local storage but when I visited the local storage folder none of the e-mails were there. (Needless to say, I only did this with e-mail I didn't care about, so the loss was no big deal)

After much effort, I managed to get my e-mail and web photos down to 95% of my quota, but now I'm stuck with managing my e-mail strictly to stay under quota. So I'm now going to start using a local e-mail client (I'm still reviewing alternatives but haven't found a good one yet), and then store e-mail locally rather than in the cloud for anything older than a month. It's a pain, since I enjoy using search, but the reality is, cloud storage is still too expensive compared to local storage for someone who get gobs of e-mail or has years of e-mail to store.

Ironically, what this means is that more of my photos will be available on Facebook (albeit at a lower resolution) than on Google's servers because of this pricing issue. But them's the breaks. I will  have to find a public photo solution later.

Review: Big Skinny World BiFold Wallet

I travel just a few times a year, but I'm weight conscious. Over the years, I've worn out any number of wallets and abandoned several for being impractical or worthless, but never felt compelled to write a review until now.

I bought a Big Skinny Men's World BiFold with Zipper a year ago from a GroupOn deal, and it has become my default wallet of choice for all occasions, eliminating all other wallets. The big features for me are:

1. Wide enough for non-US bills, which are frequently much wider or taller than US currency.
2. Thin Nylon. Leather stains and wears out for me very quickly, while producing fat wallets. Nylon isn't waterproof, but it's water resistant enough to survive a Tour of the Alps, and a year later has shown no sign of wear whatsoever. This is a very sturdy wallet.
3. Plenty of pockets for cards. You can't travel without a number of cards nowadays, and with 8 card pockets, this has plenty of room for my travel cards, credit cards, and business cards (yes, I actually carry printed business cards with me)

Overall, I've been extremely satisfied with this wallet. So much so that this year, when I found another Groupon Deal, I ordered two Skinny Mini Pens (so that I'm no longer forced to borrow from neighbors whenever I'm filling out customs forms), and a Big Skinny Passport Holder Wallet from them (holds 4 passports, which is what I need when I travel with family).

I give therefore Big Skinny wallets the highest recommendation. If you're using other wallets and have been dis-satisfied by them for various reasons, give one of their wallets a try. They are well-thought out and well worth their (admittedly high) price.

Cancun 2015

I'd been in Cancun before (in 2011, in fact) but only to dive in Cozumel and a cenote near Playa Del Carmen. That time, my camera flooded very early in the trip, so I was left with no pictures and therefore didn't bother with even a trip report.

This time, I had much better luck.

It is a truism that the first time you visit a place, you screw up a lot. It's only on later trips that you've optimized the heck out of your visit and can easily know what to do and when, so this trip report is more a "tips" report than any details.
We arrived on New Year's Eve, and then spent a day at the beach. The best snorkeling in the area was supposedly the Club Med next to the Westin, and I spotted an eagle ray, which was pretty good. But the winds were too high for Bowen to swim safely in the water, so we went back to the hotel's pool.
On the second I did a reef dive. The winds were high but the currents were strong, keeping the water clear. I've learned that diving in murky water does nothing for me, so this was a fairly decent experience. I soon learned why there were no dive moorings in the area. You jump in and are immediately swept into the water at 1-2 knots, too strong to swim against! So every dive was a drift dive, where you got picked up by the dive boat at the end. One of the other divers just kept throwing up, which must have been a miserable experience.
We went to Xcaret, which is a Mexican theme park. Reviews compared it with Disneyland, but it's a bit better if your kids are older or if you're adventurous. The centerpiece of the park is a kilometer worth of underground river that you get to swim through. Bowen was terrified at the beginning but enjoyed it within 200m of the swim. The place also had hammocks to lie in, a decent aquarium (not great), and various activities like swimming with dolphins, etc., which we didn't do since Bowen was still too young for it. I wouldn't recommend taking the plus package since the a la carte meals are so huge that you wouldn't save any money over just buying the a la carte package. The night show is also worth going to, but we didn't stay for the whole thing since Bowen fell asleep in the middle and we decided it was better to just return to the hotel earlier so he could sleep better.
Then I did a cenotes dive. The cenotes have the clearest water you can ever dive in, and it's mostly freshwater, which gives your gear a good rinse. Unfortunately, after that, the rest of my dives got canceled due to high wind and waves, so no more diving this time.
We'd booked our hotel through Costco, which had a deal with the J.W. Marriott in Cancun. In retrospect, staying at downtown Playa Del Carmen or at the Iberostar in Cozumel would have been a better idea, since downtown Playa Del Carmen was much more fun than downtown Cancun, and the Iberostar wouldn't try to nickel and dime you the way Marriott does.
Fortunately, the hotel next to the Marriott, the Hard Rock Hotel, had free wifi and if you wrangled a day pass, you got an all you can eat buffet too. I was impressed by nearly every one of their onsite sit-down restaurants. The kids facilities were pretty cool. The decor was garish, however, and the place was pretty darn crowded.
One nice thing about the area is cheap buses. A highlight was dining at Pericos. Authentic Mexican food, a great atmosphere, and just fun. Highly recommended. They even rolled out a bed for Bowen when he fell asleep on the bus on the way to the restaurant. A don't miss if you're in the area.
We also went to Playa Del Carmen and returned by bus, and it's a crowded and uncomfortable experience, but Bowen decided he enjoyed buses, so we put up with it.
I was disappointed that none of the hotels had hobie cats or other sailing dingies for rent, but the Hard Rock Hotel staff told me to just walk across the street to Aquaworld, where for $30 an hour I could rent a hobie cat. That took care of the sailing fix for me and Bowen. The boats were old and with a 3 year old aboard I wasn't going to push the speed limits, but it was still fun. They'd force you to go through instruction if you don't have a sailing certification so bring yours if you have it.
All in all, I'm not sure I'd have opted for another land vacation in the Caribbean, but for being stuck on land it was ok. Certainly the cenotes dives can't be had anywhere else, so if you're a diver for at least one dive you should suck it up and go for it.

Review: Ray Bradbury: The Last Interview

Ray Bradbury: The Last Interview, is a collection of interviews with the famous author before he died by his biographer, Sam Weller. It contains lots of little tidbits about the author that I did not previously know, like for instance his attendance of Comicon from its inception, that he wrote Fahrenheit 451 on rented type-writers at the UCLA library, and his involvement in several projects including architectural projects.

I also discovered several contradictory attitudes in the author which I was previously only slightly familiar with, and the book reminded me why knowing too much about authors whose work you enjoy isn't always a good idea.

At the $9.99 the price is very steep for a few short pages, but it's possible to check it out from the library and read it quickly.

Review: Final Horizon (PS Vita)

I'm a sucker for the tower defense genre, and happily sink hour after hour into the genre. One of the interesting things about the genre is that it's not usually super twitchy. In fact, in certain scenarios (for instance, certain levels of Defense Grid) you could almost just set everything up at the start and then sit back and watch the show.

Final Horizon is entirely different. First of all, the boards are small, which is a great fit for the PS Vita (though the game is available for the PS4 as well). Secondly, the activity on the game is frentic, as you furiously go from repairing towers (yes, they can be damaged in this game), upgrading them, or switching from one tower to the next as the attack evolves.

The story is forgettable, which is typical of games in this genre (though Defense Grid is a notable exception), and the music tends towards being repetitive. Unlike other games of the genre, however, each level is playable and over within a matter of 5 minutes, even the final boss level. That makes Final Horizon ideal for the PS Vita, which was what I played it on.

With the Vita, everything depends on the controls and the implementation, and I'm happy to report that Final Horizon does everything right. Scrolling, tower selection, repair, and upgrades are easy. If you screw up in this game, it's not because the controls suck.

Every mission has a primary objective for you to get through, but also multiple secondary objectives as well. While this made me play a few levels over just to try to get the secondary objectives, the game didn't build in enough of a reward (other than perhaps trophies) to get you to play over and over again until you get it done. That's probably a good thing, since I spent plenty of time playing the game and while it was good, it wasn't so good that I felt like I needed to put more time into it.

Nevertheless, it's a very different take on the tower defense genre (no fixed patterns to the incoming aliens, no pre-defined path, and destructible towers), which makes it a recommended change up from the usual games. That it easily fits onto the PS Vita for travel makes it ideal.

Review: Sand Omnibus

Hugh Howey has written yet another novel in the tradition of Wool, his previous post-apocalyptic world. In many ways, this novel amplifies both the strengths and the weaknesses of his previous novels.

Howey can write a compelling plot in cliff-hanger style. He can weave multiple threads of narratives together. What he can't do is create a world that's believable, nor can he do character development. Nearly everyone's a 2D character to start, and they don't change much, no matter what.

Sand is set in a world where the deserts are taking over the USA from the East to West. (This in itself is unrealistic, since prevailing winds are West to East and deserts should spread that way) Taking place in Colorado, the inhabitants of this world face the constantly encroaching sand, burying their houses, forcing them to build higher and higher, while constantly bailing sand away from critical infrasturcture like wells.

In a steady state world, this doesn't make sense, since dunes don't actually build up into infinity, so Howey has to explain that, and it's part of the plot of the book. There's also no explanation of where food came from, no mention of livestock, and no understanding of how even foundations can work in this environment.

What there is, however, is no shortage of cool toys. There are sarfers, sailboats used to traverse sand, and there's sand diving equipment, very similar to diving equipment used in water today, but obviously, with sand traversal and vision in mind. Howey does a decent job of working out the implications of the existence of such equipment, and uses these tools marvelously in the plot.

All in all, this is a decent airplane novel, and at the prices Howey's books usually come in (I read it for free as part of a Kindle Unlimited subscription), is worth picking up. But is it stellar? No, it's more like a throwback to the old days of science fiction where the writers didn't even have scientific backgrounds and didn't do any research for their novels. Still, much like Wool, it was compellingly readable.

Review: Oh Myyy!!

Oh Myyy!! is George Takei's how-to book about how to use Social Media if you're a celebrity. It's short, and rather than talk about how to become famous prior to social media's existence, it discusses his experience using Twitter and Facebook, and the various tools he uses to keep his audience engaged.

If you follow Takei on Facebook or Twitter, you'll see that the best thing about following him is that he reshares many photos and memes that are funny and interesting. The sprinkles those throughout the book, and most of them are indeed at least amusing.

The stories about how he uses social media to promote his causes (LGBT rights, as well as other Asian American rights) are entertaining and interesting. Keeping his audience engaged seemed to take quite a bit of work, as he had to preschedule Facebook wall posts sometimes days in advance, as well as having to turn down many requests from folks asking for help. He even mentions having to had to hire an intern to manage those requests and curate them.

As an airplane read it was breezy and entertaining, and you can't ask for much more out of it.

Mildly recommended.

Review: Afterworlds

Afterworlds is Scott Westerfield's Young Adult novel about writing. It's an ambitious work.

The book's structured between alternating chapters, winding together two separate stories. One is about Darcy Patel, a 17-year old who won the novel jackpot: a $200,000 advance for a two-book contract with a major New York Publishing house. Flush with success, she cooks up a scheme to avoid going to college, move to New York, and become a full-time novelist. This story-within-a-story is a coming of age story, well-described and imagined, but perhaps full of Scott Westerfield tropes, in which at least 50% of all couples are gay.

The other novel-within-a-novel is Patel's debut novel, a paranormal romance about a girl who learns that there is an afterlife, and that she's one of the select few who can move between the worlds of the dead and the worlds of the living.

A lesser writer would have made the two novels tie together explicitly, but Westerfield's too crafty to resort to a cheap trick like that. What he does show is the writing process, where Patel's real-world relationships, feedback from readers and editors and changes in her life, affect the outcome of her novel. The real-world sections balance out the paranormal romance, grounding it and making it less shallow, which it would have been by itself.

As a self-published writer, I've always wondered why people fall over themselves to give away 80% of their income to New York Publishing companies. This book goes a long way towards explaining that: it's a high flying life, with book tours, adoring fans, all creating a show-biz like atmosphere, a narcotic at any age.

In any case, this was a long read, but a fun one, and while neither novel would have worked separately, together, the two provide a coming of age story and a complete package that works.

Recommended.

Review: Little Tikes Pirate Ship Toddler Bed

We'd been sharing a room (but not co-sleeping) for months during our remodeling, and now it's finally time for the parents to move out of Bowen's room. To help the process along, I decided that we could have him get a new bed that would take up more room, as well as making him feel like a big boy.

We reviewed several beds online and settled on the Little Tikes Pirate Ship Toddler bed, since memories of the sailing trip in the Caribbean were fresh in his mind.

The cheapest place to buy this turned out to be at Target, the only store that didn't burden you with a ginormous shipping cost. When the package arrived I understood why. This thing was huge, about the size of a golf-cart packed.

Putting together the bed was fairly straightforward, but took the better part of 2 hours with power tools. This included Bowen "helping". The mattress turned out to be a standard size toddler mattress, so we didn't have to get a new one. The various lights on the bed require 9 AAA batteries, but the box didn't have any. Lucky for me, I happened to have a ton of batteries lying around anyway.

The nice feature of the lights on the boat is that they time out and put themselves to sleep, so you won't be replacing those batteries too often (they're all LED lights). I was worried that Bowen would be so excited that he wouldn't be able to sleep, but it turned out that he slept just fine on the bed even during the first night.

He really loves the boat, and enjoys turning the wheel, and he's now able to distinguish port from starboard, and knows how many cannons he has.

We couldn't have moved him into this bed any sooner, since we didn't have room until after the construction was complete. However, if we had the room, we should have moved him much sooner: his crib had a toddler mode, but he'd fallen off it a few times, while this toddler bed's designed in such a way that he can't roll off it, while ensuring that he could get in and out of bed himself if he was awake.

Recommended.

2015 will see the debut of a full-on Windows phone

I try not to make tech predictions, but sometimes one just kicks me in the face. Windows 8 has been a massive failure, and Microsoft is moving towards Windows 10, which promises to deliver a touch-friendly UI for touch-screen devices while providing a desktop experience for traditional PCs and laptops. Similarly, the Windows phone ecosystem has been stuck, with much fewer apps available in that ecosystem, and essentially only the low end Windows phones have any traction on the market.

If you look at the current market, the trend is clear: Windows tablets and Windows phones pretty much own the low-end of devices, with devices like the HP Stream able to get relatively good displays (1280x800), high performance (Atom Z3745 quad core), and a good single-user experience into a $100 un-subsidized package.

The next step is obvious: eliminate Windows phone and Windows RT, and run full on Windows 10 on a 5inch (or bigger) device with a telephony stack. What can you do with this device that you can't do on regular phones?

1. The Windows phone web-browser is easily the weakest browser on modern phones today. Replace that with IE 11 on Windows 8.1, and you go from the weakest browser to the most powerful browser on a mobile device, with full on access to services that Google (for instance) deliberately locked away from Windows phone devices like Youtube, Maps, and other services.
2. With a full-on Windows host and x86 processor, many of the appstore advantages that Android and iOS have become irrelevant. For instance, Garmin connect doesn't have a Windows app, but if you run real Windows on your phone, who cares? The same goes for photography apps.
3. Remote management and central device management for enterprises become a non-issue, since a Windows 10 phone would easily be managed using the same techniques desktop PCs can.
4. Application developers can abandon having to cross-compile for multiple platforms and go back to optimizing only for the x86 platform.

The arguments against are fairly obvious:

1. Viruses and malware target Windows. Who would want a virus on their phone? The answer to this is obvious: a locked down Windows 10 phone would only accept apps from the Windows app store, eliminating the possibility of viruses and malware. This contradicts #2 above, but just like on Android, you could have a checkbox that lets you access the full on OS for power users while protecting the naive ones.
2. The telephony stack on Windows 8.1 is non-existent, and Intel's SOFIA LTE chip isn't slated to launch till mid-year 2015. An immature telephony stack could create lots of problems. On the other hand, unlike the huge variety of devices that Windows has had to contend with in the past, having just one chip to target to could make the telephony stack relatively stable.
3. Having a Windows desktop available doesn't necessarily make a 5" phone form factor usable. In particular, with a 1080p display on a 5" phone, the UI elements on the desktop would be pretty much unusable. The UI issues that need to be overcome would be considerable. Note that with a phablet form factor (6" and up), this issue would be largely mitigated.

In recent months, it's been quite obvious that there aren't many reasons to shell out for a high end phone (of any manufacturer) for anything other than fashion reasons. However, a full-on Windows phone with a high quality screen could have a certain set of people (myself included) willing to pay the premium that such a phone could command, provided Microsoft and Intel find a way to deal with all the above issues. Such a product would finally allow Microsoft to escape the low-end "ghetto" that Windows Phone has been pigeon-holed into, and attack the high end of the market and provide some competition to the Android and iOS systems on the market by playing into the strength of Windows and its legacy apps.

Happy New Year!

Review: Seagate 4TB Solid State Hybrid Hard Drive

I realize that I'm a member of a dying breed: the desktop user. While the rest of the world is content to shoot crappy videos and photos with smartphones, processing on the same, and then posting onto Facebook and instagram, I'm still shooting with high end cameras, processing 20-25MB images on a powerful desktop on Lightroom, post-processing video on Adobe Premiere Elements. With the additional of a kid in the house, I'm shooting more than ever before, and my 5 year old computer with an upgraded 1.5TB HDD simply ran out of storage. In addition, the desktop is pretty good as a media server for recording video, so adding storage is a good idea.

The result of the recent change in the majority of users means that it's nearly impossible to find a 7200rpm 4TB HDD at a reasonable cost. The majority of high capacity hard drives now run at 5400rpm and are intended for enterprise NAS use, rather than consumer desktop use. Amazon had a sale on the 4TB 3.5" SSHD drive, and at $140 it wasn't more expensive than other slow 4TB drives, so I bought it to try.

The Seagate SSHD has a rotational speed of 5900rpm, which is slower than the 2TB version which run at 7200rpm. If the rotating platter had had a higher density, this wouldn't affect transfer speeds much, but this version of the drive has 4 1TB platters, so it's actually lower density than the 2TB drive. Nevertheless, copying data over to the new drive via eSATA got me peak speeds around 50-60MB/s via robocopy, indicating that for sequential writes, the drive wasn't bottle-necked.

In use, the drive is mostly used for photo and video processing as well as recording shows off the air, so reads and writes large sequential files. The 8GB SSD cache is tiny, but on the other hand, each import into the Lightroom catalog is usually around 1-2GB, and when comparing photos and processing photos, the files get read repeatedly while changes get written to a sidecar XML file, so this is as good a scenario as you can get for a SSHD. I would very occasionally get an initial stutter when reading the files, but once everything was in cache the experience was more than acceptable compared to the prior 1.5TB HDD.

For processing video, the machine's bottle-necked by the (quad core) CPU, which turbos to the maximum frequency and stays pegged at 100% for the entire duration, so it was definitely not limited by the drive write speed. Copying to my NAS got me 32MB/s on a wired connection, which was more than reasonable.

All in all, having an additional 2TB of storage gives me plenty of headroom for at least another few years. When this dekstop dies, I will probably switch to a chassis that lets me add drives rather than having to replace drives wholesale, but in the mean time this is a fairly cost effective upgrade.

Recommended.

Review: Fables #19 and #20

The Fables have long been one of my favorite comic book series, and it's run for hundreds of issues by now. The problem with comic books is that they're very fast reading for me, which means that it's not worth it even to buy every collected book as they come out, but rather, to batch a few of them together and buy and read them all at once. That way, you don't lose too much context between story arcs.

Snow White, volume #19 starts off with a very weak series involving one of the minor characters of the series. It builds, however, to an assault on Snow White and Bigby Wolf, with a seeming end to one of the most beloved characters of the series. (This being fairy tale, we know not to take deaths as being final) What's interesting to me is that Willingham appears to be reviving one of the oldest enemies of the fables as it stands, which I hope he does not do, as it would be a weak retread.

Camelot, volume #20 is about Rose Red, Snow White's sibling and as the title suggests, an attempt to recreate the knights of the round-table. The story goes a bit meta, and doesn't end here, but has some very creative possibilities that leaves me hanging. The series has been through a bit of a slump recently, but with these two volumes the action is picking up and I'll be looking forward to the next few volumes with relish.

Recommended.

Review: Infamous Second Son

Infamous: Second Son was the first true AAA title for the PS4. To be honest, I didn't expect to get as hooked on it as I did. That's because I tried the original Infamous on the PS3, and got only about midway before I gave up on the game as being too long and too repetitive. Furthermore, I also had Shadows of Mordor sitting right in front of me, which was a much better reviewed game.

Well, I think what made the difference is that Second Son is a pretty gorgeous game. Whereas Shadows of Mordor started you in the shadows, Second Son started you at dawn, during the golden hour. The entire game tries hard to put you in gorgeous environments, either during sunrise, sunset, or at night. While I lived in Seattle for almost a year, I'd rarely seen it in good lighting because of the constant clouds and drizzle. If I didn't know any better, I'd say that the game was written as an extended advertisement for the Seattle tourism bureau.

The other reason is that Shadows of Mordor is multi-platform, while Second Son is written by one of Sony's in house developers. Without needing to port to other platforms, the team gets to optimize the heck out of the game, and it shows. Other than the startup loading screen, the rest of the game has zero loading time, with no hiccups whatsoever and a very fast frame rate. The game felt very tight. Unfortunately, that's not true of the the Vita remote play experience. I tried that a few times and it just didn't work.

The game revolves around Delsin Rowe, who discovers that he has powers. A government agency tries to capture him but members of his tribe try to protect him and fall prey to Augstine, the leader of the agency, who also has powers. Delsin, with his brother, heads of to Seattle to try to capture her powers so as to relieve the members of his tribe who helped him.

The least likable part of the story is Delsin Rowe, who's quite a punk. Even when playing him as a good guy, he never seems to want to live up to the hero he would be, with his brother frequently trying to restrain him. Nevertheless, the powers he gains are a lot of fun: smoke, neon, video, and finally concrete. Sucker Punch (the developer) did a good job giving each set of powers distinctive feel in play while sharing similar controls so that you don't get too overwhelmed each time. Each set of powers has a distinct skill tree, so you can upgrade and customize Delsin.

The game doesn't completely balance all powers: neon is the most fun to play, so the game forces you to upgrade video and smoke by making them required as the only skills necessary for certain critical missions. Fortunately, Sucker Punch also made upgrading Delsin by collecting power-shards fairly enjoyable, so I didn't even notice I was grinding the game until near the end, when I was collecting shards so I could upgrade the last power, concrete the minute I picked it up.

Collectibles are usually a pain in game, but this is one of the rare cases where the game's made them not objectionable. There's relatively little variance in the side missions, but there's enough different types that I didn't feel like it was very monotonous. I didn't like the secret agent missions, so I just didn't bother doing them, while some of the other missions were locked out because I decided to play as a good character instead of an evil one.

As a near-launch title, Second Son made full use of the new controller. You use every button, and the touch pad as well. The touch pad felt somewhat gimmicky, but I got used to it.

In any case, I had a lot of fun playing the game, and it definitely looks and feels miles beyond the original Infamous game. If you have a PS4, I'd recommend picking it up.

Review: Lumia 635 Smartphone

Sadly, I broke my Xperia Z1, and it's broken in such a way that I'm not 100% sure that Sony will fix under warranty. So this time, I'm determined not to buy an expensive smartphone (and that way, if Sony betrays my expectations and actually fixes my Z1, I wouldn't be out a ton of money). I was going to buy another Lumia 521, but it was sold out everywhere I looked. I settled on a Lumia 635 which was on sale for about $65.

This turned out to be a more than reasonable choice. The 635, unlike the 521, has LTE coverage. T-mobile's been rolling out LTE, so this actually matters now. Furthermore, in the half year since I used the 521, Microsoft has addressed 3 out of the 4 issues I described in the ecosystem comparison! Lumia phones now have a swipe keyboard. The latest Windows phone OS's browser now supports the Digg Reader in landscape mode, and uniquely (and surprisingly to me), the 635 supports the SensorCore SDK, which means that functionality that I missed in the Moves app is now available in the Microsoft Health and Fitness app. This last bit surprised the heck out of me --- basically, this now obviates the $70 Vivofit. The only issue left un-addressed is Google voice support. To be honest, however, Google Voice's been becoming increasingly flakey and unreliable, and most of my friends (even Google employees!) have been slowly abandoning it due to Google's lack of attention in this area, so I'm not sure that Google Voice is a reason to stay on an Android platform for much longer.

There are two versions of the 635: the T-mobile version and the AT&T version, with T-mobile version being more expensive. The reason the T-mobile version's better if you're a T-mobile user is that it comes with WiFi calling, which is a nice feature especially if you travel overseas and frequently have WiFi but not phone signal. The different versions of the 635 are carrier locked, so you cannot use a T-mobile SIM in an AT&T phone and vice versa.

The big downgrade from the 521 is that the 635 does not have a camera shutter button. This would be a big deal  breaker except that the camera on either phone is worth jack, and I'd only use them under duress.

Compared with the Xperia Z1, the 635 has a few surprising strengths. The first is battery life. I'm willing to bet that any Windows phone outperforms any Android phone in this regard. On the Virgin Islands trip, my moms' 521 hardly ever needed to be charged, while the Android phones (and even the lone iPhone) were frequently on the charging table. I'm confident that the 635 will go all day without charging and then some.

The second is the bluetooth implementation. For whatever reason, the Z1 would frequently stop responding to next-track and previous-track requests from the Scion's steering wheel controls, and despite being told repeatedly to play music whenever it was connected to the car's audio system, the Z1 would refuse to do so without manual intervention. By contrast, the 635 reliably talks to the car's audio system, even going into driving mode and ignoring text messages and other random notifications, by contrast.

The third interesting thing is that Windows Phone OS is far snappier than Android! The 521 occasionally would lag a bit while resuming an app, but the 635 with a quad core CPU and a 20% MHz bump hardly ever shows me the app resumption screen, and even when it does it's only for a second or less. The Windows phone OS team has done a far better job than the Android OS team on UI optimization and such.

The weaknesses of the phone can easily be seen from the specifications. A 4.5 inch screen with 800x400 resolution just cannot compete with the Sony's beautiful screen. It's also not waterproof (though reports are that you'd better not rely on Sony's waterproofing claims), and doesn't have the magnetic charging dock capability or Qi wireless charging. For $65, I wouldn't be screaming for that. The 512MB RAM also prevents me from posting large Facebook photos, for instance. Given the poor camera on the phone, this is probably a good thing for my readers and followers on Facebook, but it also means that I wouldn't be processing RAW photos on the Windows phone and posting them while on trips. The phone camera also doesn't have a flash nor does it have a front-facing camera. Given the poor quality of the rear camera, I would have preferred to just have a front camera for Skype video chats and such.

One thing that the Sony had that I missed is the nice NFC-backed tap to pair with my SBH-52. No big deal, since surprisingly, the SBH-52 picked up my Windows phone quickly and eagerly pairs with it even without prompting, something that my Z1 didn't always do! So much for vendor-driven integration.

All in all, the 635 is a surprisingly good package at a low low price. If I had to live with this as my only phone for the next 2 years I'd miss the Z1's excellent camera and flash, but wouldn't necessarily feel deprived. At this price range, there's no competition that even comes close. The Moto G LTE phone, for instance is $190, which is more than twice the price I paid! You'd have to go with the Moto E GSM ($115) to come close, and that phone only gives you 2G on T-mobile in the US! And both phones running Android would be far more sluggish than the 635.

Needless to say, this phone therefore comes recommended.

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.

Review: What If?

What If? is Randall Munroe's book of Fermi estimation questions and answers. If you've ever worked for any of the well-known (or even less well-known) tech companies, you're familiar with Fermi estimation questions because they're frequently used to interview candidates. The other community that loves Fermi estimation problems are physicists (hence the reference to Fermi), and this is a book full of them. Munroe's background was in Physics before he became rich and famous by writing and drawing XKCD.

What's cool about this book is that almost all of them involve scenarios that eventually destroy the Earth, hence very few of them would be ever come up in a Google (or Microsoft) interview. Nevertheless, I found the book as much fun to read as any novel, and much more fun than most. (The one question that would be useful is: "Will the internet ever provide more bandwidth than a Fedex box full of storage media?")

If your name was Sherlock Holmes, you'd disdain this book, since it's chock-full of little titbits and facts that you'll never ever need to know and irrelevant to your work. But for the rest of us, I highly recommend this book as a quick fun read that will back a trans-Atlantic flight go by at an impressive rate.

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.