Speeds and Feeds

Since it's likely that many people will be getting new digital cameras during the holiday season, this warning about a USB Faux Pas from EDN's Brian Dipert is timely.

Dipert reports that different brands of cameras have micro-USB-style connectors that look compatible but aren't--and he found that the combination of a Panasonic camera with a Kodak cable damaged the camera.

I can't agree with Dipert that there ought to be a law, but I wouldn't mind a court ruling that Kodak and Panasonic are at fault here.

Companies that need a USB-like connector with additional vendor-specific pins should work with the USB Implementers Forum to get a new connector standard defined. Creating plugs and sockets that can damage, or be damaged by, other USB-like products is just wrong.

In a way, this story is left over from CES 2008, where I attended a blogger party hosted by the Parnassus Group and sponsored by, among other companies, Virgin America, the US domestic airline counterpart to Virgin Atlantic.

The party was a lot of fun, and all the sponsors did extensive giveaways. I got a flight suit from Intel and Zero G, a private company that offers "weightless" (parabolic trajectory) flights. Alas, I didn't win a Zero G flight, but I did win a free flight on Virgin America. In fact, I think pretty much everyone at the party won one of these prizes-- apparently they gave away 80 flights.

A Virgin America A320 Airbus aircraft

(Credit: Virgin America)

The free flight coupon, which was good for one round trip in the main cabin (that is, coach class) anywhere Virgin flies in the US, was valid through the end of May, so when Montalvo Systems shut down in early April I was able to spend some time planning a trip.

Although Virgin America flies to several West Coast destinations, I spend most of my time on this end of the country anyway. The two choices that seemed most attractive were New York and Washington, DC. Ultimately I decided I could have a better time in DC and not spend so much money, so that's where I went.

Buying the ticket on the Virgin America website was pretty easy once I figured out that the site requires customers to apply discount codes in advance rather than also accepting discount codes when paying for a flight.

I had to pay $21 in fees for the flight, and I chose to pay $25 extra for an exit-row seat, but the discount still amounted to $277.20. Normally I'd say such a meager amount wouldn't influence my posts here, but it's probably the case that I wouldn't be writing about Virgin America otherwise...

The airline charges $25 extra for "premium" seats at the bulkheads and exit rows in the main cabin. As a fairly tall guy, I like this idea-- it discourages people from taking these seats if they don't need them, and makes them more likely to be available for those of us who really need them.

I was able to get an exit-row seat on the return flight, but not on the flight out. The seat pitch in the main cabin is adequate for moderately tall people such as myself, but only barely. It's about like American Airlines, which is the airline I usually fly on.

Virgin America seems to have learned some valuable lessons from the success of JetBlue on these transcontinental flights. Virgin provides fairly comfortable leather seats in the main cabin and attractive leather massage chairs in first class. The airline's Airbus airplanes (my flights were on A320s) are attractively decorated inside with color-changing "mood lighting" (which remained set to blue and purple on my flights).

Virgin provides a high-quality multimedia entertainment system with a 9" touchscreen LCD at every seat. The system, called Red, carries 24 channels of live satellite TV (sourced from Dish Network), 20 channels of live satellite radio, a good variety of on-demand TV shows and music, movies, simple games, and even chat rooms. I checked frequently but never found anyone in the chat rooms on the way out; on the way back, this feature was disabled.

The system has menu options called "Read" and "Shop", but they were not active. It seems to me that unavailable options ought not to be displayed.

The Dish Network channels are standard definition, not HD, but are stretched to fill the widescreen LCDs, which I find annoying. The broadcasts didn't come through reliably; on both flights, there were long periods when some of the channels were experiencing trouble, even in level flight at our cruising altitude under a clear sky. Sharp turns caused the satellite receiver to fail entirely, but I suspect there's no good way to solve that problem. On the return flight, four of the channels (ESPN, ESPN Classic, BET, and BBC America) were carrying Dish informational programming instead of the intended content.

I was pleased to see that the music videos and some of the pre-recorded TV shows and movies are offered free of charge. For example, I found several of the TED Talks and an episode of Patrick Norton's Tekzilla (an old one-- episode 17 from January 2008).

When watching the pre-recorded content, there are pause, rewind, and fast-forward controls. These functions aren't available for the live broadcasts-- no in-air DVR yet, sorry.

I also appreciated the live flight map based on data from Google Maps, although it doesn't offer a satellite view or a really close-up view of the road maps. It seems to me that these features would be useful, but I suppose that providing them would require much more on-board storage. The map can pop up over whatever TV show you're watching, which makes it convenient to check the progress of the flight during commercials. There was an odd problem with this feature-- the black pixels on the map overlay were actually transparent, so legends on the map (city names, etc.) were intermittently illegible depending on the TV image. This function worked well on the flight to DC, but was not reliable on the flight back. Even after we landed at SFO, the system showed the airplane was a few miles southwest of the airport.

The system can also be used to order food, which seems like a great idea, assuming it doesn't run the cabin crew ragged. Some of the things you can order are free, like sodas, but most items are sold to generate additional revenue. Accordingly, "Eat" buttons are easy to find on the wired remote control and the on-screen menus.

Entrees-- salad and sandwich type stuff, no hot food-- were around $9; snacks were $1 to $2. These prices were competitive with those of airport shops, and it's certainly more convenient to get the food onboard-- but most airports offer more variety. A turkey-bacon wrap sandwich I ordered came without the expected accessories (napkin, mustard, etc.).

One of the most valuable features on board-- to me, at least-- was the provision of two 110V outlets for each set of three seats in the main cabin. (Presumably the folks in first class get one each.) Finally, there's a legal way to power and recharge my laptop in flight. The DC outlets found on some airlines won't charge a MacBook Pro, although they do let the machine operate without running down the battery further. Virgin's AC outlets are oriented horizontally, rather than the usual vertical arrangement in most wall outlets, which made for a fragile connection to the MacBook Pro's power adapter, which frequently fell out.

Virgin America also offers Ethernet and USB jacks at each seat, but these are currently useless. When I hooked up to the Ethernet jack, my laptop detected the connection, but didn't receive an IP address, so there was no way to communicate over it. I can imagine this feature could be useful for business travelers who need to collaborate on some project during the flight, but until a DHCP server is provided, even peer-to-peer networking will likely not work.

The USB jack, allegedly provided to allow customers to recharge cellphones, iPods, and other USB devices (and, according to the on-board Welcome guide, to hook up a full-size keyboard for the in-flight entertainment system, an amusing notion), didn't even provide power.

Bottom line-- the electronics and the in-air food ordering are fun, but not enough to make a difference for me. I will certainly consider Virgin America for future travel, but I'll continue to choose airlines based on price, schedule, and compatibility with my existing frequent-flyer miles, as I've always done.

Coming up next, a few museum reviews! I spent most of my time in DC doing the usual touristy stuff, and I ran across a chunk of ENIAC, the world's first general-purpose digital computer, in an unexpected place...

There was only one product at CES 2008 that I couldn't wait to get--a new model of safe from the Sentry Safe company. I even tried to buy one from Sentry's website one evening while I was still in Las Vegas, but that turned out to be impossible; it has to be shipped by truck freight, so I had to place the order with Sentry over the phone to make those arrangements.

The Sentry QE5541 Fire-Safe offers commercial-grade protection for computer media at a price low enough for home computer users.

(Credit: Sentry Safe)

I ordered the safe when I got back home, and it arrived here last week--a good bit sooner than the company predicted. I've got it all set up and it's all working. I'm very happy with it.

I got the QE5541, the largest model in a new line of six fire- and water-resistant safes designed to protect CDs, DVDs, flash drives, iPods, etc. from fires lasting up to two hours at temperatures up to 1,850° F.

And the really cool thing is that it'll also protect a 2.5" USB hard drive...while the drive is operating and connected to a computer outside the safe via a USB passthrough in the safe door. So for the first time, your backups can be continuously protected, even if you're not around.

If you're like most people, you don't even make regular backups of your personal computer. Most people who lose digital family photos, electronic book manuscripts, and disk files containing critical financial records to house fires don't make backups, either. But the worst thing must be to have a full set of backups get burned up along with your computer.

It's never happened to me, but I try to learn from my own mistakes before I make them. During 2007, I nearly placed an order for the Phoenix Datacare 2025 Media Safe, which is available from the Keystone Safe Company and other Internet vendors. The 2025 is another fire- and water-resistant safe designed to protect computer media. It has an internal volume of 1.22 cubic feet and costs $1,579 from Keystone. Compared with other safes I considered, the Phoenix was a pretty good deal.

Sentry's QE5541, by comparison, has an internal volume of 2.0 cubic feet and costs $519.99. Freight costs for both safes are similar, around $75 for basic delivery. So the Sentry safe is a really great deal.

And then there's that USB connection. That's unique. It makes the Sentry safe useful in a way the Phoenix safe could never be. I can stick a USB-powered hard disk inside--there's a pocket for it on the door--and run my nightly backups, or Apple's Time Machine software, without having to remember to move the disk drive into the safe after the backup finishes.

There are some limitations. The disk drive has to be a 2.5" USB-powered model because there's no separate power pass-through on the safe, just the USB connection. In my testing, a new Western Digital Passport 320GB drive worked fine but some older USB-powered drives didn't. Even the Passport didn't work unless I hooked up the second power connector on the USB cable Sentry provides to hook up the safe to a computer.

The problem is that USB ports provide +5V DC power and USB-powered hard drives require +5V DC power. That may sound more like a solution than a problem, but the USB specification also requires that power-hungry USB peripherals such as hard drives be connected to a USB port through just one cable. On the Sentry safe, there are effectively three cables: one outside the safe, one inside the safe, and one buried in the door of the safe to bring the USB connection through.

The resistance of all that extra wire and the extra connectors causes a voltage drop that could interfere with proper operation of the hard drive. I tested the power inside the safe with the hard drive running using a special USB cable I built for testing purposes some years ago. The final voltage was only barely in spec with the Passport and significantly lower with those older drives. But Sentry provides high-quality cables and connectors, and I think it should be reliable as long as you're using the provided cables and a good hard drive.

There's another consequence of this issue: there isn't enough power coming into the safe to run more than one hard drive. You'd need a hub in the safe, but bus-powered USB hubs don't provide enough power for USB hard drives anyway. I was able to use a bus-powered hub to hook up several flash drives just for testing purposes, but there's little practical value to that. I'd like to see Sentry offer a model that can support one or more full-size (3.5") drives, but in that situation, heating could be a problem; a fire safe has to be well-insulated, so even the ten watts or so produced by a 3.5" hard drive might be too much.

(I have my own solution to that problem, which I hope to discuss with Sentry at some point.)

I said earlier that the QE5541 is one of six new safes from Sentry, but that's an oversimplification. Two of these models, the QA0002 and QA0004, are actually just hard drives permanently sealed in a protective safe-like case. They're like big, heavy, virtually indestructible external USB-powered hard drives. Unfortunately, they're also just 80GB and 160GB drives based on Maxtor mechanisms, well behind today's state of the art in USB-powered drives. And at $339.99 for the 160GB model, they're expensive, too.

Sentry provides an interesting service for these two models. From the Web page: "If your Sentry Safe hard drive experiences fire or water damage, we will attempt to recover your data free of charge and send you a new unit." That's a good deal.

Sentry's $99.99 QA0110 is designed to protect up to 100 CDs or DVDs, but doesn't have a USB pass-through, so I don't find this model particularly attractive.

The QE5541 I bought has a smaller sibling, the QE4531, with 1.2 cubic feet of interior space plus the USB passthrough. If I bought the Papa Bear model, the QE4531 is for Mama Bear.

The remaining model, then, would be Baby Bear's--the QA0121, which can hold 60 optical disks plus a standard 2.5" USB-powered hard drive like the Passport. I think this one will be "just right" for most people, and at a price of $169.99, it's a lot more affordable than the big models. The one downside to the QA0121 is that the fire protection is only good for 30 minutes at 1,550° F. That's probably adequate for most residential fires, but you should think about how long it's likely to take for your local fire department to respond, how soon they can get to your home office, and what the construction of your house is like.

I wanted the extra protection and security of the QE5541, however, so that's what I bought. Sentry said it would take 3 to 5 weeks to arrive, but it got here in just ten days. It was delivered to my driveway in a big cardboard box with a small forklift-type wood pallet on the bottom; it was up to me to get it up the front steps and into the house. I was prepared for that, but if you need inside delivery, be sure to ask for it. (Sentry didn't mention that service when I placed my order, but it's a routine add-on from most shipping companies.)

Once I had the safe inside and located where I wanted it, I drilled a couple of holes through the bottom of the safe as directed in Sentry's documentation so I could use the provided lag screws to secure the safe to the floor. This procedure is easy enough, but if you want to do the same you'll need a drill with the right bit, plus a suitable tool for driving in the lag screws.

Then it was just a matter of installing the batteries for the electronic lock, testing the combination a few times (the safe comes with one predefined combination; you can set more), and hooking up the hard drive.

I've moved in all my backup media, some old external hard drives I'm not using, original install disks for my commercial software, and three complete older laptops. (The product page mentions "protects up to 72 CDs and DVDs" but this refers only to the capacity of a removable shelf provided with the safe. The safe will actually hold hundreds of DVDs on spindles or in the Maxell Double Slimline jewel cases I use.) I feel a lot better knowing that these items are now much more likely to survive a house fire.

If I have a fire, I'll post here about how well the safe works. But I hope I never have to make good on that promise!

Well, the new Sony PRS-505 Reader I ordered last week arrived today, quite promptly, even with the optional engraving.

Peter's new Sony PRS-505 Reader.

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

Here it is. (I blurred out the email address I provided; it doesn't get any spam, and I want it to stay that way.) The screen is showing the only complete book Sony provides with it-- a public domain "classic" that I haven't yet read, and probably never will. The PRS-500 came with a few complete ebooks plus a lot of excerpts. Apart from Wuthering Heights, the PRS-505 is preloaded only with excerpts.

But that's no big deal. Most of what I read on my old Reader was public-domain material, and there's a huge variety of such ebooks available on Project Gutenberg. There are also many websites offering free recent ebooks-- the Baen Free Library, Wowio, and more. Just look around.

Anyway, it's the Reader itself I want to talk about. In my previous blog post, "Hoping for the best from Sony's updated Reader," I wrote about the poor control placement of the PRS-500 and wondered if the PRS-505 would be much better.

I think it's better, at least. The two sets of page-turning buttons, for example, are now placed so that the PRS-505 can be used while held in either hand. I think it's easier to hold in the left hand, though, which is generally better for right-handed users.

Sony greatly improved the utility of the 0-9 buttons on the PRS-505. In their new vertical arrangement, they line up with menu items (at least in portrait mode), and when reading an ebook, they can be used to jump directly to a selected page number.

The other buttons are pretty much the same as on the PRS-500. A little easier to activate now, but no major differences.

Almost unchanged is the size of the PRS-505. It's a little thinner, but the outline shape is the same. The weight is only about 3% lower-- 337g vs. 347g, which I measured with the standard soft cases. Still, that's under 12 ounces; not bad for a gizmo with a six-inch screen.

The screen is different on the PRS-505, but not much different. Page turning looks a little different and is slightly faster-- but not enough to matter. The improved display is said to have eight levels of gray scale instead of four, but that difference is pretty much invisible. The contrast ratio is still the same-- test is a very dark gray on a light-gray background.

The more light you get, the better. I bought the optional clip-on LED light Sony offers with the new Reader. Sony sources it from Great Point Light. It does the job, although the clip is a huge general-purpose arrangement that is sub-optimal for the Reader and the light requires separate batteries. Sony, when you do your next Reader, design a plug-in light specifically for it.

Let's see, what else is different. Oh, the PRS-505 has two slots for flash cards: one Memory Stick Duo slot and one SD Card slot. The PRS-500 had one slot that could accept either a full-size Memory Card or an SD Card. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the PRS-505 can manage both cards at once-- up to 8G capacity on the Memory Stick Duo, up to 2G on the SD Card. I think 10GB of ebooks ought to be enough for pretty much anyone.

Unfortunately, the slots are not protected-- they're open to the top edge of the unit, which is not covered by the soft case. That means they might pop out if bumped; I'll have to keep an eye on that. (On the PRS-500, the slot has a cover.) If it becomes an issue, I suppose I could put a strip of tape over the edge to protect them.

Speaking of the soft case, the PRS-505 attaches to its case in a different and better way than the PRS-500 did. The old Reader had a strange set of plastic clips that would latch into the center of the back face of the Reader, applying a worrisome amount of force to the center of the screen in the process. The new Reader clips into prongs at the top and bottom of the cover's spine, so the Reader is free to pivot around within the case. That should work much better.

When I received the PRS-505, the battery was only partially charged, so I immediately tested the recharging situation. I'm glad to say that a major problem with the PRS-500 has been solved. As I mentioned before, a fully-discharged PRS-500 couldn't be recharged the usual way, with a USB cable; the AC adapter was required.

I ran the PRS-505 down by playing music (otherwise it would have taken days of page-turning), and after the unit shut down, I tried to force it to restart. After four attempted restarts, the Reader wouldn't even try to restart. I hooked up the USB cable and saw the charging light illuminate. I tried to restart the Reader at that point, but it wouldn't start even though it was charging. (From the manual, I gather this is deliberate, though I don't know why.) I waited about a minute, then removed the USB cable, after which the unit was willing to restart. Once it was running, I reattached the USB cable and everything worked normally.

The other thing that happened at that point was that the PRS-505's internal storage quickly mounted itself as a disk drive on my Mac with 190 MB of free space-- a big boost over the PRS-500. I verified that I could copy e-books directly to the unit, and after disconnecting the USB, the PRS-505 scanned itself and added the books to its menus. Even files in a folder were located and added to the menus. When flash cards are installed, they show up as drives on the host system as well.

Well, that's it for the hardware analysis. I'll follow up with my impressions of the new software load on the PRS-505. Like the hardware, the software isn't dramatically different, but it's better.

Just based on what I've seen so far, however, I think it's fair to say that there's no particular reason to upgrade from the PRS-500 to the PRS-505. If you don't have an ebook reader at all, though, the PRS-505 is the one to get.

This week, Sony introduced the new PRS-505 Reader for ebooks. I've already ordered one to replace my PRS-500, which I used a lot before it broke not long ago.

Update: my PRS-505 has arrived. The review, in two parts, begins here.

Glaskowsky's broken Sony Reader PRS-500.

(Credit: Peter Glaskowsky)

That's my old Reader there. The damage was internal, somehow. I have no idea what went wrong. I didn't sit on it or anything like that. I just turned it on one day and that band on the left side of the screen showed up. You can see that the band doesn't extend to the top of the screen except in one spot, and even within the band, some of the pixel columns still work normally. There's also a horizontal band of dead pixels. All in all, the damage makes it impossible to use the unit, although it still works in every other way.

The photo also illustrates the really abysmal placement of controls on the PRS-500. The pair of buttons on the left edge turn the pages. The top one moves forward a page, but unless your elbows are hinged differently than mine, you'd probably find it easier to hit the bottom button of the pair. In normal use, the bottom "page back" button is just in the way.

The standard way of attaching the folding leather cover puts the hinge on that edge, which makes it even more difficult to get to those buttons. Even folded all the way around, the cover is bulky and spongy along the spine. Fortunately I discovered it's possible to put the cover on backwards, allowing me to hook a finger into the space between the front and back covers. This works great for holding onto the unit; though in that configuration, the magnet that holds the cover closed no longer works.

The other button on the left edge changes the font sizes on the screen. In some documents, there are three sizes: small, normal and large. In practice, they're more like "too small," small, and medium. In PDFs, you only get two sizes...and the largest size still limits the display of any PDF to the width of the window. So if you have a PDF from a textbook, you probably won't be able to read the text no matter what you do.

This isn't just about how sharp the user's eyes are; the screen only has 600x800-pixel resolution, so small text is inherently fuzzy. Also, because the E Ink screen has lower contrast than paper, text has to be larger to provide the same legibility.

Then, down at the lower-left corner of the unit, about three inches away from the pair of page-turning buttons, there's a big round rocker button. Guess what it does? It also turns the pages. Its active positions are toward the upper-right and lower-left directions, so it works equally badly in portrait and landscape orientations. But since the other page-turning buttons are basically out of reach in landscape mode, this rocker button is pretty much mandatory for that mode. And of course, Sony stuck another button underneath it. (That one's for marking a page for later reference. I never found a use for it.)

Over to the lower right, there are two more kinds of control-- a tiny little joystick surrounded by a one-way rocker switch in the shape of a ring. The joystick controls menus-- although menus are strictly linear, not hierarchical as implied by the joystick's four-way movements. The joystick is also a pushbutton. Finally, the PRS-500 has a set of 10 buttons along the bottom edge of the screen. These also work for selecting menu items; there are never more than 10 on the screen. (But menu items are arranged vertically when using the device in its primary portrait orientation.) When viewing the book text, however, hitting one of these buttons sends to the beginning, end, or intermediate page numbers within the book: 11 percent, 22 percent, 33 percent, etc.

Do you ever find yourself wishing for a fast way to get to the 44 percent point in a book? Me neither.

Seriously, it's like there were four different committees at Sony, each fighting for a different user-interface model for the PRS-500...and they all won. How Japanese.

Sony PRS-505 Reader Digital Book

(Credit: Sony)

OK, here's the new PRS-505. (It's also available in blue, like my PRS-500.) Some things have changed. The 10 buttons are now disposed vertically along the right edge, next to the primary pair of page-turning buttons, which are tucked into some kind of cosmetic crease that seems pretty weird to me. The other buttons at the bottom of the unit have been redesigned a little, but some of the basic problems haven't been fixed. All I can do is hope the PRS-505 is actually easier to use than it looks.

I should know pretty soon; I ordered a PRS-505 as soon as it showed up on the SonyStyle online store. Sony said it'd be able to ship the unit within a couple of days.

Here are some things to note about the new gizmo. The price has dropped from $350 at the debut of the PRS-500 to $300 for the PRS-505, but you can still get the PRS-500 from some retailers, typically for $280 or less. However, the PRS-505 doesn't come with an AC adapter, as the PRS-500 did. You can charge the unit from any USB port. But the PRS-500 could get into a situation when fully discharged where it couldn't wake up enough to start charging from USB, requiring the user to plug in the AC adapter. If the PRS-505 has the same issue, customers could find themselves with a "bricked" Reader. I'm betting Sony has fixed this problem, though; I didn't buy the optional AC adapter for my PRS-505. (I still have the AC adapter from my PRS-500, too, so I may be OK anyway.)

The PRS-500 came with a $50 credit for the Sony Connect ebook store online, at least at first, when I bought mine. The PRS-505 doesn't. Sony still offers a credit for 100 free titles from the "Connect Classics" series, but these are all available on Project Gutenberg anyway-- and in fact, at least on the PRS-500, the Project Gutenberg versions work better.

On the other hand, Sony offers free engraving when you buy the PRS-505 online. That's pretty cool. Apple does the same thing for online sales of iPods, and I've always taken advantage of it. I did the same thing on the new Reader, supplying my name and e-mail address, so if I lose the thing, there's at least some chance I'll get it back.

Of the software improvements, a Sony press release states:

More advanced users will appreciate the new USB-based mass storage capability that allows them to use the device as a portable drive for the direct transfer of documents, images and other files to the Reader. A new auto sync feature also lets users set up folders with books and documents that can be automatically synchronized when the device is connected to a PC.

These are significant improvements. Probably more important is that Sony plans to add support for Adobe Digital Editions, a new software platform for viewing PDF and XHTML (aka ePub, a format defined by the International Digital Publishing Forum) documents--later, that is; it apparently isn't in the PRS-505 yet. Since the PRS-500's built-in PDF reader is so awful, I'm sure the Digital Editions software can only be a big improvement.

I have to say, if you already have the PRS-500 or any other good e-book reader, the PRS-505 is probably not worth upgrading to. But for myself, I'm looking forward to getting the PRS-505 and getting back into my e-book groove.

When I posted my review of Belkin's TuneTalk Stereo, a representative of APC commented on the story to suggest that I might want to use APC's Mobile Power Pack to extend the iPod's battery life when recording.

I started to reply to describe the gizmo I designed to power my iPod from a spare PowerBook battery-- a little clip that connects the battery terminals to an iPod dock cable. This is what I used to use to power up my old 4th-generation iPod while recording long conference sessions with the Belkin Voice Recorder for iPod.

But even as I was typing, I realized ... Read more