June 26, 2008

First look: Roku Netflix player

Mrs. EG and I just ordered one of the new Roku Netflix players. If you haven't seen one of these before, it's a hardback book sized appliance that ties into your Netflix account via your home Internet connection (ethernet or WiFi). I ordered it on Sunday after seeing one at Terence Spies's house.

The fulfillment and out of box experience is pretty good. I ordered it on Sunday and had it on Wednesday morning. I pulled it out of the box and had it wired up to my TV and Internet in 10 minutes. The box booted up, asked me whether I wanted wireless or wired, downloaded a firmware update, and then gave me an access code. You log on to Netflix's web site, enter your code, and a few minutes later, the box announces it's ready, offers you access to your Netflix instant queue, and you're watching video on demand. I spent more time figuring out where to plug in the wall wart, routing the cables through my audio stand, and getting an ethernet jack live in the room than I did getting the box running.

Video quality is pretty good, even through S-Video (my DVD player is using my only component jacks), and it's really nice to be able to just decide you want to watch something and be watching it a minute later. The selection is kind of limited, and slanted towards older movies and cheesy 80s TV shows (plenty of Magnum and Quincy), but if you just want to relax and watch something, there's plenty available, and the fact that browsing is so low impact means you can take a chance on stuff that you ordinarily wouldn't be willing to accept Netflix's latency to try. Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter, anyone? An additional benefit, at least for now, is that there's no additional charge over your basic Netflix account—actually, I dialed down my subscription because I wasn't really keeping up anyway. I wonder how long that will last.

That's the good news. The bad news is that it's clearly a first generation product. For starters it's slow. From the time you select what you want to watch it takes about 20 seconds of waiting before the video shows up. I know that sounds nitpicky, but since that happens pretty much every time you want to change what you're watching, even fast forward or rewind by a minute, it starts to get annoying after a while. At some level you're limited by the speed of the network, but you could also do a lot better with more buffer and lookahead. For instance, the box could download the first 5 minutes of everything in your queue, so it would always be 5 minutes ahead. This would allow instant play and limited fast forward. And if you kept the entire movie as it was being watched, you could do complete rewind. This delay is doubly irritating because once it's started streaming stuff into the buffer you can't interrupt it until it's started playing.

Obviously, this would require a lot more storage than the box has (256 MB from what I understand), but that could be easily fixed by adding an external drive. Easily, I say, except that the Roku doesn't have an external USB or Firewire jack, so it won't accept an external drive. This is too bad, really, because if they had just added a jack, external storage would just be a software update. You could still use a network-based NAS, I suppose, but that's not really as cheap or convenient1.

The other (sort of strange) problem I've found is this weird interaction with my TV. I have one of the early Sony WEGA TVs with the anamorphic squeeze feature. For some reason, the TV decides that the Roku is sending out anamorphic images and squeezes everything down, making everyone look just a tiny but fat. If you tell the Roku to emit in 16x9 rather than 4x3, the aspect ratio comes out OK, and stuff in widescreen looks fine, but stuff in 4:3 comes out centered on the screen with about 3" of black border on each side. Not terrible, but sort of annoying. Not sure if this is a problem with the Roku or a problem with the TV—though my DVD player works fine. I don't see any additional settings in the Roku, but maybe there's some way to reconfigure my TV: a little web searching shows some potential angles to try, though I can't say I'm super-excited about putting my TV into service mode.

Posted by ekr at 9:35 PM | Comments (2)

April 22, 2008

Well, that didn't take long

Nalgene is announcing they are going to phase out their polycarbonate bottles:
ROCHESTER, N.Y. (April 18, 2008) - In response to consumer demand, Nalgene will phase out production of its Outdoor line of polycarbonate containers that include the chemical Bisphenol-A (BPA) over the next several months, it announced today. Nalgene's existing product mix, including the recently launched Everyday line, already features a number of containers made from materials that do not contain BPA.

"We have always been focused on responding to the needs and concerns of our customers," said Steven Silverman, general manager of the Nalgene business. "With 10 different product lines in several different materials, we have the largest bottle offering on the market today. By eliminating containers containing BPA from our consumer product mix, our customers can have confidence that their needs are being met."

The company recently unveiled its Everyday line, an assortment of bottles manufactured with Eastman's Tritan copolyester. The line includes favorites such as the OTG ("On the Go"), the iconic 32-ounce Wide Mouth and the Grip-N-Gulp sippy cup. Tritan is impact resistant, withstands a wide range of temperatures and does not contain BPA. The new Everyday products are already available in stores and will be available through www.nalgene-outdoor.com next month.

I guess once you have an alternative, it's pretty easy to get rid of the offending product. I wonder if Nalge will start lobbying for a ban on BPA now.

Posted by ekr at 6:00 PM | Comments (0)

April 19, 2008

The beginning of the end of food grade polycarbonates?

Opinion has been shifting against polycarbonate plastics for a while now, and now Canada has decided to ban polycarbonate plastics for baby bottles:
OTTAWA -- The Canadian government moved Friday to ban polycarbonate infant bottles, the most popular variety on the market, after it officially declared one of their chemical ingredients toxic.

The action, by the departments of health and environment, is the first taken by any government against bisphenol-a, or BPA, a widely used chemical that mimics a human hormone. It has induced long-term changes in animals exposed to it through tests.

...

The health minister, Tony Clement, told reporters that after reviewing 150 research papers and conducting its own studies, his department concluded that children up to the age of 18 months were at the most risk from the chemical. Mr. Clement said that animal studies suggested "behavioral and neural symptoms later in life."

Clement claims that adults aren't at significant risk (note: I haven't really reviewed the literature myself at all), but MEC and Patagonia have already pulled polycarbonate drinking bottles (aka Nalgene bottles) off their shelves, and Nalgene has already introduced a new line of bottles called "Everyday" which aren't based on BPA but on Eastman's Tritan, which is supposed to be comparably tough to polycarbonate. Also, according to this article, Charles Shumer has introduced a bill to ban the use of BPA-based polycarbonates in food and drink applications. Industry has been pretty actively opposing this kind of regulation, but given that alternatives are starting to appear, I suspect we've reached an inflection point where they'll just start replacing polycarbonate in most applications instead.

Posted by ekr at 10:17 PM | Comments (3)

April 14, 2008

What's nice about a GPS watch?

Joe Hall asks why one would want a GPS-enabled watch. Roughly speaking, there are three features I want:

In principle a gizmo like this might be useful for getting you un-lost, but the fact that you don't have a real map, just a view of where you've been, makes it pretty hard to use for anything other than backtracking. If, for instance, you're doing a loop and there are multiple trails but not a dense enough network that you can just vector in on your start point directionally, than without a trail map a GPS is pretty useless. Pretty good for out and back trips, though.

Posted by ekr at 10:01 PM | Comments (4)

April 11, 2008

First (and last) look: MSR Sweetwater

I recently found myself in the market for a new water filter to replace my venerable Katadyn Hiker (don't ask what happened, suffice to say it wasn't Katadyn's fault). Anyway, I cruised over to REI and after a bunch of dithering let the sales guy talk me into an MSR Sweetwater. In theory the Sweetwater has some advantages over the Hiker:

That's the theory. The practice was a little less overwhelming. First, the pumping action promises to be convenient but I actually found it quite awkwared and worse than the Hiker. Worse, I hadn't pumped 10 liters of clean water before water started spurting out of the overpressure port. I first attributed this to a tight seal with the container I was pumping into, but even after I vented the container (which seemed to help some), it still seemed to be spurting. When this happens you are supposed to scrub the inside of the filter. This seemed to help temporarily, but later in the day when I was forced to pump from some murkier water, it clogged again and worse yet the output seemed to be slightly green. We were able to scrub the filter and get OK-looking output from a cleaner stream later, but this did not leave me feeling very warm about the whole thing, and seeing as I originally bought it from REI, I returned it at the conclusion of our trip. It's surprising, actually, since I've had other MSR gear (including the classic Whisperlite stove) and had found it to work pretty well.

At this point, I'm trying to choose between another Hiker. I've had several and they're quite solid. There's also the brand new MSR Hyperflow. It's only about 2/3 the weight of the Hiker or Sweetwater, and pumps twice as fast. It's a different filter technology than the Sweetwater so there's no reason to think I'll have the same clogging problem. On the other hand it's absolutely brand new, so I'm tempted to wait for others to gain some experience with it before forking over my money. The one bad thing I've heard so far is that if you let the filter freeze it destroys it, so for cold weather camping you'd need to sleep with it, which is kind of lame.

Posted by ekr at 11:24 PM | Comments (1)

April 5, 2008

Priority Start?

In the comments section Brian Korver points me to Priority Start, which is a third party gizmo that claims to detect excessive battery drain and disconnect the battery, thus avoiding complete drain. Looks pretty slick. Anyone have experience with one of these?

Posted by ekr at 10:12 PM | Comments (0)

April 1, 2008

Important safety tip: Toyota Prius battery

Went to start our Prius today and the door wouldn't unlock. I thought it might be the key fob but when I manually unlocked it, put the fob in the ignition and got inside, none of the console lights would come on. It turns out that we'd left the dome light on and run the battery down to zero. How can this be, you ask? It's a hybrid car with a 6.5Ah battery. Surely, it should be able to power a crappy roof mounted lightbulb more or less indefinitely. It turns out, however, that that battery just runs the drive system. There's a dinky little lead acid battery that's used to run the onboard electrics and (presumably) start the gas engine. This is easy to run down. Or at least so says the guy who came by to jump start it. Sure would be nice to have some gizmo that detected when you were running down the battery and shut down the internal lights. Not exactly a complicated piece of science to add...

Posted by ekr at 11:20 PM | Comments (4)

March 30, 2008

I gotta get me one of those suits

Speedo has put an immense amount of effort into developing faster swimsuits, and swimmers using their newest suit, the LZR racer, have broken 13 world records in the past 6 weeks. Understandably, FINA (the governing body for swimming) is somewhat concerned:
EINDHOVEN, Netherlands - The slick new swimsuit that has led to 12 world records already this year will be examined by swimming's governing body amid debate about the quest for speed in the pool.

"There are concerns about suits being like triathlon suits, which are thicker," FINA executive director Cornel Marculsecu told SwimNews.com on Monday. "There are buoyancy issues. We have to review this."

There have been 13 world records set since mid February, 12 in the LZR Racer, a full-length body swimsuit made by Speedo, a brand of Warnaco Group Inc.

There's a lot of science in the LZR. Principally, there are a bunch of features (bonded seams, water repellent fabric) to reduce drag, but the most interesting one is that it's deliberately stiff and supportive around the waist:

The internal core stabilizer supports and holds the swimmer in a corset-like grip and helps them to maintain the best body position in the water for longer.

Body position really is important in swimming—when I was doing triathlon it was one of the things I found hardest to learn. I can't say whether something like this would have helped me and I don't know enough about the technology of swimsuits to say if any of this helps. I skimmed Speedo's site and they claim to have research that shows that these suits improve oxygen efficiency, which basically maps to performance. That said, it's certainly that case that your clothes can change swim performance: baggy suits create more drag and wetsuits dramatically increase performance due to bouyancy and (as far as I can tell) especially keeping your lower body high thus reducing drag even without the need to kick (cf. pull buoys).

The most interesting part of Speedo's site for me was the interviews with athletes who talked about how much they loved the suits and how nice they felt to swim in. The topic of the impact of technology on sports (and fair competition, and purity, etc.) has been discussed ad nauseum, but one thing that rarely comes out in such discussions is the user experience, namely that going fast is fun, and even small differences in your gear make a big difference in how responsive and fast you feel. One of the great things about racing is you get to use your very best, fastest gear—often stuff you couldn't train with every day, either because it's too expensive or (as with racing flats) it's too hard on your body to use all the time. Of course, after a while you get used to the good stuff and then it doesn't feel as great which is another reason why most athletes reserve it for race day. (I've heard this said by swimmers about shaving down as well.)

Posted by ekr at 10:14 PM | Comments (0)

March 21, 2008

Woah. UTM looks pretty nice

One of the things I've always found difficult about navigating with standard topo maps (and a major motivation for being able to download maps into my GPS) is the pain in the ass that's finding your position based on lat/long. Let's take your typical 1:24000 scale map of the Bay Area:

Using a map like this and starting with GPS readings, finding your position involves converting minutes and seconds to inches (with different scaling factors for lat and long) and then measuring to find the right point on the map.

It turns out—and I feel pretty stupid for not knowing about this already— that there's a much easier way: Universe Transverse Mercator. The basic idea is that you divide the earth into sectors which are small enough to be treated as rectangular and then you can describe any position within the sector by measuring the distance (in meters) from the corner. Generally your GPS can emit UTM coordinates and good topo maps come labeled with UTM grid lines, so finding your position is a simple matter of locating the nearest grid ref and doing a little interpolation. You can even get nice little map tools that let you measure UTM distances on maps of common scales (especially the 1:24000 scale used on the most useful topos). This is dramatically easier; I've known about it for less than 8 hours and I'm already quite a bit better at finding my position with it than I ever was with lat/long.

Posted by ekr at 10:56 PM | Comments (1)

February 4, 2008

First look, MacBook Air

As you may have heard, the first MacBook Airs become available today. Gigantic Apple Fanboy Terence Spies has been waiting for weeks to buy one, so naturally when we heard they might be available we hoofed it over to Apple Store Palo Alto.1 They didn't have any SSD Airs in stock, but plenty of hard drive ones, and since the imperative here was to get something, anything, and there is a $999 price premium for the SSD, Terence went for the hard drive.

Anyway, I got to spend about 2 minutes with the gadget before Terence whisked it away to his next meeting. Based on that experience, I'm totally unqualified to say anything useful about it other than it's incredibly thin and light, and the screen looks pretty good too. On the other hand, unlike the iBook I'm typing it on, it's got this creepy third eye thing going on in the top center of the LCD bezel. If I buy one of these suckers, I'm definitely going to need to invest in some electrical tape.

1. Actually, I called first, but just got some sort of IVR and then no answer. This is actually a bit surprising, since you'd expect that their IVR would automatically recognize from caller-id that I was an iPhone early adopter and automatically transfer me to the the "Apple Sucker MacBook Air availability hotline."

Posted by ekr at 10:20 PM | Comments (9)

January 15, 2008

This looks pretty sweet

OK, so the MacBook Air is now available. I may actually buy a Mac laptop this time.

Oh, also iPhone software 1.1.3 is out, with the cell network triangulation location feature. Not as nice as GPS, but it did figure out where my house was to within 50 meters or so.

Posted by ekr at 11:37 AM | Comments (1)

December 18, 2007

Back on the air

Sorry about the posting outage. My laptop died (yes, I have a backup of the data) and it took me a while to get another machine prepped and usable.

I'm also now in the market for a new laptop and may finally go Mac this time. They're incredibly heavy, though. I hear rumors that maybe finally this time they'll give us a subnotebook. Any readers want to share?

Posted by ekr at 7:50 AM | Comments (7)