Looks versus weight

Should I get a Game Boy or a PSP? Been agonizing over this question for a week.

I must have games when I have to queue up for anything or when I’m on the plane or subway. My phone used to do the job but the buttons are starting to wobble from all the frantic pressing. Phones aren’t made for playing games are they.

So I shopped around yesterday but went home empty handed. The Sony PSP’s display is superb but with the size and weight I might as well be carrying a rock. Forget it. The Nintendo Gameboy has a nice practical size but the display is like crap. Even an ordinary phone’s display puts it to shame. Forget it too.

Surely there be something as small as a Gameboy with the display of a PSP? And with a dedicated joystick? Hate the idea of going back to the Nokia N-Gage but I may not have a choice. Hmm… should I risk it? It’s so last decade though…

Problem with WordPress Avatar upload

I tried uploading my avatar into WordPress.com like 10 times today and despite it confirming that its loaded I still get this:

Anybody know if their avatar upload is actually working?

Edit: Holy smoke, a couple of hours after I posted this it works. I think WordPress should be renamed Wierdpress! LOL

WordPress Recent Comments widget

Great, WordPress has modified the recent comments widget and added an icon next to the commenters names

but its not working as it should. New comments are not listed!

Is it just me or is everyone getting this?

Edit: Well whatdya know, looks like they got it fixed 2 hours after I posted this!

Browser Review: Safari 3 for Windows

This is the 5th day I’ve used Safari 3 on my Windows XP machine. To cut to the chase here’s my review:

Things I like

1. Sleek gunmetal grey interface

2. Fast. Media-rich pages load noticeably faster than with Firefox and IE. No kidding.

3. The standard fonts have better contrast than FF and IE and are easier to read, especially if you’re into text-heavy stuff like blogs.

4. The URL window at the top doubles up as a download progress indicator (window fills up with a blue color as the page completes its download).

5. A dedicated button bookmarks the page you’re viewing with a single click.

Things that annoy me

1. No skins other than standard grey.

2. Primitive tab control. No option to auto-open links in a new tab in the same window without right-clicking.

3. The RSS bookmarking sucks. Instead of showing you a list of topics on a site when you mouse over the bookmark, you just get a number in parenthesis against the site name. Example, a (2) means 2 new topics on the site since your last visit. To see more you have to click the bookmark and import the entire RSS content into the browser which can take a while. Not very smart when all you wanna do is quickly scan thru the topics list.

4. Haven’t found any status bar that displays the URL of a link that you mouse over. Basically you can’t decide beforehand if a site’s worth a visit until you actually visit it. Duh…

5. No sign of any plug-in or add-on features meaning you’ve to live with whatever (in)capabilities that come with the browser.

6. And most annoying of all, you can’t turn off the URL autocomplete feature which apparently compiles its URLs directly from your history and imported bookmarks. Its very distracting. The only choice left is to go into private browsing mode (no history) and delete all my bookmarks. Blegh.

Ok maybe I am biased in favor of Firefox with its plethora of free skins and add-ons that give the browser so much power so it doesn’t really make for an apple-to-apple comparison (no pun intended) but seriously, if you can get past the inconvenience of the slightly lower speed, FF is waaayy ahead of Safari in functional richness.

I don’t really buy the argument that Safari is new therefore deficient. They’ve had plenty of time to catch up in versions 1 and 2 which didn’t happen. If the folks at Apple know that 90% of things done on the internet are done through the browser and more and more people are buying PCs just to get online, this all-important window to the cyberworld won’t be this half-baked. I mean other players out there are killing each other to be top dog in the browsers war.

Needless to say I continue to pledge my allegiance to Firefox.

Astromax: My review Part 2

Following my review in Part 1 where I covered mostly the software aspect of Astromax, let me now talk about its physical aesthetics. I’ll keep it short and sweet because in all honesty there isn’t much to say about it.

The Pros:
It fits into the last vacant shelf of my AV cabinet

The Cons:
1. The red LED on the front panel is irritatingly distracting. Why does it have to be sooo RED, sooo COARSE and sooo BRIGHT until it kills the ambience of good movie watching. Where’s the dimmer control? There’s none.

2. No dedicated on-off AC power switch. If you have to reboot your Max as often as I do (which is about once every 3-4 days nowadays), you really don’t want to grope the wires behind your AV cabinet, every time guessing which plug is wired to which component. Its just plumb dangerous.

3. The smart card when fully inserted sticks out by 1 cm. An accident waiting to happen.

4. The whole box design is so American. In other words boring, like something out of the 80’s. And I thought the world has moved on to way-cool Euro/Japanese style design philosophies? I mean just look at how uninspiring Motorola phone designs are.

To make a long story short, I think Astromax’s box design sucks. It sticks out like a sore thumb in my rack of AV electronics. Without an on-board power switch, it is a hassle to reboot and knowing how frequently the Max locks up, I wonder how in the world did they miss that out.

‘Nuff said.

Astromax – My Review

I was tempted to write a review of Astromax the day after I got it but didn’t think it would be fair so I decided to wait a month before doing it.

Astromax has been a blessing. In just 4 weeks I managed to fill up my 80GB drive to 70% or approximately 40 hours of shows. Yes my Max is loaded because my life doesn’t revolve around Astro’s schedule, which is the primary reason why I got Astromax in the first place. I suppose the same reason made the ubiquitous VCR a success in the old days.

Max comes with a lot of nice features you would expect. One immediate thing I noticed was how the video output was sharper than my old decoder. I use S video connectors and a 32″ flat screen TV on both. Although subtle, the difference was noticeable enough for me.

Here are more things to like about the Max:

1. You can peruse Astro’s program schedule on your TV. It is updated by satellite daily.
2. One touch programming. Just use the cursor to point to any slot in the shedule and click on record. The recording starts and stops by itself.
3. Decent sound quality.
4. Watch one channel while recording another.
5. Time shifting feature. Press pause during live broadcast, answer the phone and press play to continue without losing a second.
6. Optical output jack (haven’t used it yet though)
7. Say goodbye to VHS tapes. Everything’s recorded on hard disk.

In this review I’ll set aside the barely-passable aesthetics of the box to focus on something more important – the inbuilt PVR software. This is the Personal Video Recorder program that gives you the blue-hued interactive menus and fancy features.

Menu navigation is fairly intuitive and most home users will find themselves frequenting two areas, the Planner where you define your recording schedules and My Max which lists all the stuff you’ve recorded. You play back your recordings by choosing a title in My Max and clicking on “Play from the start”. Since Astromax’s controls can be learnt in a few minutes without reverting to the manual, it is user friendly in my books.

Program management in the Max is a breeze. You can delete any recorded show anytime by going to My Max, choosing a title and hitting delete. If you attempt to record programs on a full disk, I’m told it will overwrite the oldest shows stored but I haven’t got that far yet. What I do find is that because the Max is so easy to use, I’ve become trigger-happy with recordings. It’s like going to a buffet. You end up loading so many things on your plate you know you can’t possibly finish. My bad. Hopefully it’s a habit that’ll correct itself in time.

The Max is certainly not perfect yet and here is my wish list.

An escape button
I wish all menus have a global “escape” button whereby with just one click I can exit from whatever I’m doing and go back to the last live channel I was watching. There is a “back” and “exit” button on the remote but they don’t always work as expected.

Synchronization problems
I wish they used a better algorithm to deal with the lag between the scheduled program time and actual broadcast time. Let me explain. Lets say you’ve set the device to record something scheduled at 10-11pm. In reality, the show comes on air 10:05-11:05pm. The machine faithfully stops recording at precisely 11pm and the result? You lose the last 5 minutes of your show. I’ve lost many a drama episode this way. A real anticlimax.

To deal with this, Astromax gives you an option to extend a recording’s end-time by a few minutes. Yes it solves the problem but creates a new one – by creating a conflict with any back-to-back recording you may have programmed. To illustrate, let’s say you are trying to record these shows.

10:00-11:05 pm, Program A (You’ve manually extended the recording stop time by 5 mins to avoid losing the ending)
11:00-12:00 am, Program B

This attempt will fail because overlapped recordings aren’t possible on Astromax.

When such conflicts happen, the system will ask you to choose between “shortening” the first recording (which I think undoes the time extension you chose) or canceling the second one. Hmm.. keep this or dump that or dump this and keep that. Whatever, solving one problem by creating another is no solution to me, especially if you don’t know when the show’s next rerun is going to be.

If back-to-back recordings clash, the obvious solution is to allow the user to batch-shift ALL affected slots forward in one go, meaning shift all their start and end times by the same amount, instead of just allowing users to manipulate end-times only as is currently done. Its like dealing with a railway coach. The only way to move one car foward a metre is to move the the next coach and the next forward by the same distance. Since satellite broadcast lag is fairly constant at 2-5 minutes for every program, a batch move-forward feature should safely solve the problem.

Recording the same show many times inadvertently
How do you decided whether to record a program or not? If you decide based on the program’s synopsis like I do, then you better pray that the synopsis provided is sufficient. Unfortunately this is not always the case with Astro.

This is more an issue with Astro the service provider rather than Astromax the hardware manufacturer (apparently its a Thomson box) but because Astro is the distributor I’ll treat them as the same.

We all know that Astro shows lots of reruns and that’s good for people who haven’t got a VCR or Astromax. The problem is if their synopsis doesn’t tell you if it’s a repeat or even give a proper description about the episode, you’re left wondering if you’re about to record something you’ve already seen. For example, for shows like 30 Seconds to Fame, you’ll notice the synopses are always the same. While non Max users can just click to another channel, it is a problem if you’re away and have recordings scheduled. I’ve ended up recording the same episode 3 or 4 times because I didn’t know they were reruns. What a waste of precious disk space and a source of annoyance.

To be fair, the Max software does provide an option to display rerun information but I’m told Astro has not activated the feature yet. Solution: while waiting for it to be activated, can’t they at least provide the episode number for each show. I mean, Star Wars can have Episode 1, II, etc., how hard is it to type it into drama series synopses?

Software Hang
This is probably my biggest gripe about Astromax. It hangs (freezes) a tad more frequently than I would like it to and when it does, the only thing you can do to unfreeze it is to power it off and back on again – basically a cold restart. The fact that my set hangs on me every 2-3 days disturbs me. I suspect the firmware needs a lot more testing.

I do realize we’re talking about Astromax version 1 and for that I don’t expect a perfect 10. However in other countries, this technology has been around for years and the manufacturers are not without experience. So I hope to see improvements the next version.

I will write a review on the hardware aspect of Astromax when I have the time.