Category: Family

An Olympus Stylus 720 SW. I haven’t played with it much yet, but it seems pretty good so far.

It’s main selling feature for me: It’s supposed to be shockproof. I’m not planning on testing this actively, but I do intend to just toss it in my geekbag and leave it there.

The only negative I’ve found so far is that there seems to be a bit more noise in low light conditions than I’d like. I’ll play with it a bit more and then post some pictures.

Anyone have any recommendations on a good, cheap, digital camera? Something with a 4 mega-pixel ccd, good battery life, outdoor readable display, fast cycle time, and quiet zoom/focus motors? I’d also like it to be small, light and sturdy enough to throw in my geek bag without getting damaged.

’cause as a camera, my phone just doesn’t cut it:

I got back from the Toronto trip Thursday evening. The drive back was exhausting because of some seriously unsettled weather. Over the course of the trip, I drove through at least 5 micro-cells, a couple of which included zero visibility events — always fun when passing transport trucks on the 401.

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Today was my first opportunity to relax enough to figure out what was wrong with photo uploading. As usual, the problem was that my ../uploads/2006 folder wasn’t in the webserver’s group. (To use the Eclipse vernacular: “FIXED”)

Of course to test it, I grabbed a recent orchestra photo and tried to upload it (see below). This is the first time I tried to push a full size image from Deb’s camera up and it exposed a limitation in the current WP code: If your picture is >3Mpixels, it won’t create a thumbnail. I shrunk the picture down a bit, and now all is right with the world:

The orchestra tuning up

I made it to Toronto without incident (except that travelling north on the Don Valley Pkwy at 5pm, which I had to do for about 8K, is never a good idea).

The GPS worked well, but it seemed to randomly drop the bluetooth connection. Not sure if that’s the fault of the GPS or the PDA, but it only happened 3 or 4 times, so it wasn’t a big deal (select the GPS unit, hit ok, wait 10 seconds, back on track).

The room is nice. I wanted to upload some pictures, but I seem to have screwed up the rights on my upload directory, so that will have to wait until I get home.

[Caution: long post. Feel free to ignore this one if you don’t care about GPS stuff.]

Last summer, I bought a bluetooth GPS unit just before our summer vacation. At the time, I ranted about the sorry state of GPS on the Mac. As I am about to go on another trip (driving to Toronto for four days), I thought I’d check out the SOTW again.

Unfortunately, nothing useful has happened in the interim.

Route 66 doesn’t seem to be even offering a Mac solution anymore (but it’s hard to tell from their website). This is apparently no great loss, since I have never seen a positive review of the Mac version.

MacGPS Pro has been updated a couple of times, and now supports moving waypoints and routes between a GPS and Google Earth; this might be useful if I had a GPS with a display, but I don’t. There still doesn’t seem to be any simple (hopefully automated) way of getting your own maps into it. Real maps still cost extra money. It still doesn’t do route planning itself, or provide directions, spoken or otherwise. I stand by what I said previously:

This might be useful if you were doing marine navigation, or some such, but it’s not for road travellers.

So the best way for Mac users to get navigation and route planning still seems to be to get a copy of Microsoft Streets & Trips for Windows and run it on VirtualPC. Boo. Actually, with a new Intel MacBook Pro and a copy of Parallels Workstation, I bet that running Streets & Trips would be perfectly reasonable. Unfortunately, I still haven’t convinced anyone to give me a replacement for my PB15. Oh well, maybe next year.

Which leads me to Palm based navigation.

My friend Ken got the palmOne GPS Navigator. In general, he likes the included TomTom software but has two significant complaints:

1. There doesn’t seem to be any easy way to get the address for a POI — which, for example, is a problem when you’re trying to find out if the only Sheraton it knows about in a particular city is the one that you have reservations for (or whether it’s one of the other five).
2. The map data is pretty sparse for Canadian locations. [hint: The closest Canadian Tire to my house is not in Mississauga.]

These complaints, plus the fact that it’s almost 300 $CDN at retail in Ottawa, have not immediately endeared me to this solution.

On a more prosaic note, it doesn’t look like there have been significant updates to Mapopolis since we used it on our vacation last summer. On that trip, we used my wife’s Zire 72, but since she’s not travelling with me this time, I’m stuck with the LifeDrive — that rant is a subject for another post. Mapopolis makes several dire warnings [caution: PDF link] about running on the LifeDrive, but the most important of these is:

The LifeDrive requires a Bluetooth GPS unit with the new microcode (i.e., Mobile Crossing BT-308, Globalsat 338 or clone thereof) for a reliable BT connection.

As it happens, the MG668 I got last year does not have the new microcode. However, up until I got the last LifeDrive ROM update, I was able to use the MG668; it was flaky, but still usable. Unfortunately, ever since I installed the update, talking to it from the LifeDrive using Mapopolis will cause the LD to lock up within a minute. *sigh*.

Of course, I could solve this problem by just buying another Zire 72 and running the software on that, but the retail price on these is also close to 300 $CDN. Even I can see that that would be suboptimal, even if it did mean I could put the LD away on a shelf.

So what am I to do? Now that I have travelled with a GPS, I wouldn’t want to go with out one. For me at least, knowing exactly where you are at all times really does remove a lot of the stress.

Well, it turns out there is a third way. I called my buddies at Mobile GPS Online (who are based in Ottawa) and asked them if they had either the Mobile Crossing BT-308 or the GlobalSat 338 in stock. Wouldn’t you know it, they had the 338, so I went over and picked one up. I guess 190 $CDN is still not cheap, but if it worked with the LD and I didn’t have to buy new software, that’s still better than $300.

I brought it home and set it up to charge, then went over to my sister-in-law’s house for her birthday party — Happy 40’th Stacey. When I got back, I grabbed it and my LifeDrive, and told Deb I was “going down to Tim’s for a coffee” (/em winks).

So, moment of truth time: I started Mapopolis, told it to start the GPS — of course, I want to turn the damn bluetooth on –, hit the power button on the 338 and… it connected on the first try. Yes! Now to see how long it stayed connected…

The punch line: It works perfectly. It stayed up and showed me where I was on the moving map all the way over to Tim’s. On the way back, I asked for directions back to my house, and it voice nav’ed me all the way home (with street names). Woo hoo!

Apologies to anyone who’s been waiting for new content on this site. I’ve been busy getting the Eclipse R3.2 release out. We’re not done yet, but things are finally starting to slow down. And the orchestra is done for the season, and Deb isn’t travelling, and no one is sick (although Deb’s allergies are starting to get to her). Hopefully, that means I’ll have the time to get back to regular postings.

Last night after work, I brought my machine in to the shop and they replaced the loaner card they had given me with a brand spanking new BFG 7900 GTX OC. I must say, it’s a beautiful card: factory overclocked; 512Meg of RAM; polished heat pipes; and it’s quieter than my old card.

As usual, the first thing you do when you get a new graphics card is maximize every possible setting in every game you play, and then wonder why it’s not that much faster than the one you had. However, I must say I am very pleased. Here are some examples:

World of Warcraft

Everything set to the maximum at 1600×1200 gets you a silky smooth 60FPS+ basically everywhere. Even in Ironforge, outside the auction house, I was getting 58 FPS(!). I would have expected to see higher numbers than this in less graphically intense places, so I need to do a bit more investigation, but I’m not complaining. (Update: I turned on 8xAA/16xAF, and turned off “full screen glow” in game, and it’s still around 60 FPS. Gotta like it.)

Oblivion

I cranked up every slider to the max, 1600×1200, with 4xAA instead of HDR. Running around in the forest gets you somewhere around 25..30 FPS, everything else is faster. There’s also much less “chunkiness” as textures get swapped in. It’s very nice. I think I’m going to have to play through from the start again.

F.E.A.R.

I re-installed F.E.A.R just to see how well it would run [Bah! Why do companies still release games on CDs?]. Again with everything max’ed at 16×12, it was perfectly smooth almost everywhere, but I did see a few places with a lot of geometry, where the framerate dipped into the 20’s. My guess is that this is still being limited by the CPU. Oh well, next Christmas maybe I’ll get myself one of the new quad Intel’s. (/em winks)

All in all, a very satisfying upgrade. I’ve got a few more games I still want to try on it, but I really have to start practicing seriously for my next concert — it’s only a couple of weeks away — so I don’t really want to go into maximum-gamer-geek mode right now.

The good news is that this platform is a much stronger base for future upgrades than what I had before. There are clear paths for CPU (quad core or D EE), graphics card (SLI) and HD (RAID 0).

Later. (Amso will see you in Azshara)

Theoretically, it arrives tonight. Unfortunately, I’ll be practicing with the orchestra tonight, but I should be playing with it Friday. I’ll post more info once I’ve had a chance to actually use it.

Another busy week at work, but at least I’ve started riding my bike again (only one way per day so far — thanks for the rides, Deb). Now all I have to do is get back in shape enough that I’m not exhausted after the 10..12 kilometer trip. It does tend to mellow me out though, which is probably a good thing. 🙂

I’m still waiting on the graphics card for my new machine, and believe it or not, I’m also still waiting for my new glasses. I called the optometrist today and was told that they would definitely be in on Monday. Er… sure.

This weekend, Deb and I have a wedding to go to on Saturday night, then Deb’s family is coming over here on Sunday, then we’re going to my parents on Monday. I’ve got tomorrow off, at least, so that’s a bit of a break, but I expect Deb will want me to help clean house because of the incoming guests. Monday is still a work day for me.