Here’s what I’m going to do:  I’m going to look around the house (and van) and see which gadgets I’ve bought have really become a useful part of my life, and which ones haven’t.  This is the first part, the useful.

So to get right to it:

Useful: iPod & iPod2Car

The time I spend driving to work and back is valuable, and I used to spend it listening to local radio, but I never really enjoyed it.  Talk radio hosts whose goal is just to make you angry, and music radio that’s more talk than music (especially in the mornings).  I tried some other things (more in the next article), but what’s really worked well for me is having the iPod in the car and listening to a combination of audio books and podcasts (and the occasional music).

The iPod2Car hooks into your factory stereo and provides an iPod interface to it.  It’s supported on most factory stereos that can take an external CD changer.  Best Buy sells it and installs it; I think the final price, installed, for the iPod2Car and the vehicle-specific harness was around $320.

I bring in the iPod every few days to sync up some new stuff, and then it’s back in the vehicle.

Feature I don’t use:  iPod Video.  I’ve never watched video on the iPod and doubt I ever will.

Useful: Harmony H659 Remote

Logitech has created a killer product in their line of smart remotes.  It’s a great combination of hardware and software that makes controlling your stereo stuff easy.  I have the Harmony H659, though there are better models available now.

Two things I especially like about it.  First, you don’t program in macros; you tell it what devices you have and how you’d like them configured.  This is different from a lot of learning or macro remotes in that when you press “TV” you’re sending a fixed set of commands, you’re sending the commands necessary to get from the current state to the new state.  If I’m using the XBox 360 and I press “Watch TV”, it knows the TV and receiver is already on and just sends the command to change the inputs.

And the other good thing about it is the Help button, which is a wizard that walks you through getting things to work when they don’t.  For example, if everything is off and I hit “Watch TV”, but don’t aim the remote at the TV, maybe the stereo will turn on but the TV won’t.  Press “Help” and the remote asks you questions like “Is the TV on?”, “Is the receiver on?” and helps you get things back in sync.

Got a complex stereo setup and a wife or girlfriend who is afraid to touch it?  This remote will go a long way.

Feature I don’t use:  The “Media” button and the ability to synchronize the TV guide into the remote.

Useful: The XBox 360

What can I say.  I have it, I use it, I like it.

I picked up an HD DVD drive for it and I use that a lot too – though not always for HD DVD movies.  It’s just nice being able to leave a game in the console while I put in  movie to watch.

Feature I don’t use:  Ability to plug in an iPod.

Useful: Windows Media Center

I use Windows Media Center to watch TV.  It’s go the best TV guide I’ve seen in a PVR, though I haven’t seen a TiVO, and I like the flexibility that it’s a PC.  For example, I recently installed a version of DVRMSToolBox that supports commercial skipping, so now when I’m watching TV and a commercial comes on, it instantly skips past it.  Nice.

The Vista version of Media Center doesn’t look as good as the XP version.  The XP version’s menus were cleaner and simpler.  Hopefully the Vista version gets some attention before the next major Windows release.

Feature I don’t use:  “More Programs”, which are mostly just ads for pay services.

Useful: Laser Printer

I’m sick of inkjet printers.  I don’t print a lot, and when I do, usually one of my ink cartridges is low, or dry, or needs cleaning.  Around Christmas, the Minolta Magicolor 2400W laser printer was on sale for a really good price (under $200) so I bought one.  Now, when I send a document to the printer, out pops a piece of paper, every time.

Printing photos on a laser printer isn’t as nice as printing them on the inkjet, but for the hassles I’ve had with inkjet printers, I’d rather just take my pictures in to Costco and print them there.  It’s cheaper anyway.

Feature I don’t use:  Ability to feed in different sizes of paper.

Useful: Digital Camera

I’ll mention which cameras I have, since I’m generally happy with them, but this is more of a personal choice.  I have an SD450 as my small camera I can carry around anywhere, and an S2 IS when I want something better.

I take video clips almost as often as I take photos, so the S2 IS works out better for me than a Digital SLR, though I acknowledge that they can produce better photos.  The S2 has an awesome 12x zoom, while the SD450 only has 3x zoom, but is small enough that I can take it to the park or wherever, and catch those spontaneous shots.

Feature I don’t use:  Special processing modes like solarize and night mode.  Automatic, one of the manual modes, and movie modes are mostly what I use.

Useful: Canadian Tire Eliminator PowerBox 600A

What good are gadgets without power?  The PowerBox is a big battery with a built-in inverter.  You can charge it from your car or AC power in your house (or a solar panel, which Canadian Tire also sells), and you can use it to provide 110 volt AC power or 12 volt DC power.  I’ve used it to boost the van a few times, and it’s a good extra power source for your laptop, camera, cell phone, etc., when camping.  It’s also a nice safety net for a power outage.

Canadian Tire’s website isn’t very web-friendly so I can’t link directly to it.  Their loss.

Feature I don’t use:  The radio.

Useful: Uniden TRU8866 Dual-Line Cordless Phone

The TRU8866 is a great phone.  It sounds good, feels solid, and importantly, supports two lines.  I started using Vonage about 2 years ago, but didn’t want to commit to Vonage as my only phone, so I had both a Bell line and Vonage for a while.  This cordless phone let me plug one line into Bell and the other into the Vonage PAP2 access point.

You can get add-on bases for it, so when I was doing the wiring for our house, I didn’t bother putting phone jacks every where I might want a phone – I can just pick up a base and plug it in anywhere.  Each phone talks to the base station for access to the phone network, so only the base station needs to be where the phone jacks are.

Cordless phones are an area where there’s a lot of potential for innovation.  802.11 support, VoIP support, colour screens, there are all kinds of possibilities.  I expect someday someone will figure this out and open this market up but for now, this is the best I’ve found.

Feature I don’t use:  Phonebooks.  Just too much of a pain.

Useful: Mio C310x GPS

Any GPS with a color touchscreen interface would fall into the Useful category, I think, but the one I’ve got, the Mio C310x, was surprisingly inexpensive.  I’ve used it on a few trips now and I like it.  The suction cup it comes with holds it to the window in the van, where it quickly picks up a signal and gives a nice pseudo-3D view of where I am and the next part of the route. 

I’d like to have a GPS with text to speech support, and better geocaching support, but for the price, I can’t really complain.

Feature I don’t use:  Ability to play MP3s.

—

That’s it for now – what gadgets have you found truly useful?

Well, what I got is a completely different GPS!

I mentioned that there’s a C310x that uses basically same hardware platform but  with different software; what was in my C310s box was a C310sx, a combination of the Canadian flavour of the C310s and the updated software of the C310x.

Take a look at the small image of the sticker on the bottom – it says “Model No: Mio C310″ and then underneath it, “SX”.  The Windows CE sticker on the bottom says “Windows CE .NET 4.2 Core”, whereas the previous version said “Windows CE .NET 4.1 Core”.

Okay so it’s a differnet GPS.  What’s different about the navigation software?

• It’s faster.  The 3D view updates at approximately 5 frames per second instead of approximately 2 frames per second.
• It has tons of extra options:
• Automatic Night Colors (based on time of day)
• You can turn off-route recalculation on and off
• Pick your vehicle – Bus, Taxi, Bike, Walking, Car
• Dynamic volume, based on your current speed
• More routing options
• Cooler voices (though still no TTS)
• Smart Zoom – zooms based on your current speed
• You can control the angle, not just the altititude, in the 3D view.
• You can have it show points of interest on the map while you’re driving.  Nice.  Combined with angle control, this lets you see upcoming points of interest.
• Nicer rendering of 3D maps.
• You can have it do an animated fly-over of a route – I guess this would be useful if you wanted to use the GPS to show someone how to get somewhere.
• You can add Via points to a route.

Basically, this is a much more desirable product than the C310s.  So how is it that I have one?

The box says C310s, and so does the CD, but the manual says C310x: 

The box I got is a “Repacked” (so, possibly refurbished) box from Staples; I wonder if they simply messed up when they repacked it and put the newer model in the box?  I’d be interested in hearing if this has happened to anyone else.

A few more (blurry) screenshots:

So far that’s been a good decision, because the games that came out in 2006 that I wanted to play were mostly on the XBox 360.  Oblivion, Gears of War, Dead Rising, and a few others.

But what does 2007 hold?  Joystiq has an article about 2007′s strong PC gaming lineup, with a few interesting games on it.

The games they list as drool-worthy on the PC are Spore, Crysis, the WoW expansion The Burning Crusade, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and Supreme Commander.

Most of these will not be showing up on the XBox 360.  The most interesting to me,  Spore, will, so it’s not a total loss.

Its not really a question of whether I’ll have access to every game, but to enough games that I want to play.

The big one, of course, is Halo 3, coming in March.  Resident Evil 5, Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, Marvel Universe Online, Fable 2, Blue Dragon, and Mass Effect give me a few games to look forward to, and that’s not an exhaustive list.

I guess we’ll see if 2007 brings any “gotta have it” PC games that force me to plunk down for a DX10 video card.  The one that’s come closest so far is Flight Simulator X, which looks great in DX9 mode – they haven’t released the DX10 patch yet, but when they do, well, we’ll see.

Something occurred to me a couple of days ago – at work, we use Cisco VOIP phones.  This means when I call home, I’m talking VoIP to VoIP.  And the calls sound great.

I’m still not ready to fully commit to Vonage at home; I recently switched my Bell line to to Roger’s “Home Phone” service, based on PacketCable.  No problems with that so far.

At home I’m using a Uniden two-line cordless phone, which is perfect for fence-sitters like me – I can use my Rogers line or my Vonage line from any phone, with only one base (all the handsets communicate wirelessly with that base). 

Being an external drive, and therefore not a core peripheral, games can’t depend on it being there. In fact, I believe Microsoft has stated that games will *not* use the HD DVD drive. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is no ability to boot HD DVD discs, making HD DVD games impossible, but there’s no evidence they’ve gone that far (and since, down the road, the HD DVD drive might well be built-in as standard equipment, being able to boot from it would make sense).

A DVD-9 disc, which is what XBox 360 games come on, holds 9 gig of data. The only reasons I can think of for any game to use more than 9 gig of data are if it includes some huge real-world data set (like satellite imagery of the whole planet, for example), or if it includes a lot of high definition video.

HD Video is great when you’re watching a movie, but in my opinion (and I know not everyone agrees with me here), when I’m playing a game, I’m playing a game, not watching a movie. If my game disc can’t have 2 hours of 1080p video on it, well, then so be it. If I wanted to watch a movie, I’d watch a movie.

For the next few years (probably throughout the XBox 360′s lifespan), PC games will continue to come on DVDs, because PC’s with high definition drives are going to be rare, and Blu-Ray vs HD DVD is going to slow adoption. The only platform that will have the capability to play a significant amount of HD video in a game title is the PS3, and I just don’t see game developers going to the trouble to create this video for one platform, except for a few showcase titles I’m sure Sony is working on.

In other words, HD DVD vs Blu-Ray vs DVD isn’t going to make one game better than another.

The XBox 360 HD DVD drive is an add-on, which means the core system is cheaper. I’m okay with that – it means you can shell out $400 for the system today, and then shell out another $200 a year later to upgrade to the HD DVD player.

For an XBox 360 owner, there are a number of advantages to having the HD DVD drive as an XBox 360 add-on, rather than simply buying a standalone HD DVD player:

• When you want to watch a movie, you don’t have to take out the game you’re playing. I know it’s no big deal, but it means when the movie’s over, you can switch back to the game without having to get up off the couch. And if you’ve got kids it means you can leave the Baby Einstein DVD in the drive and switch between your game and the video whenever you need to.
• You also don’t have to reconfigure your TV / stereo to switch between a game and a movie. This is a big plus.
• While you’re watching a movie, you can still be on XBox Live. If you ever put a movie on while you’re working or doing something else, this means your friends can send you messages or invite you to games while the movie’s on. Not for every situation, but sometimes this is great.

So I’ve talked myself into buying one.. I wonder how soon "Holiday 2006" will come?

I took a look at the the Blu-Ray and HD DVD formats a while ago, and at the time, concluded that HD DVD would win. I based this on two things: Mandatory Managed Copy, and Hybrid Discs.

Managed Copy is a feature that allows you to make a copy of the disc’s contents onto a computer. Support for this is one of the things that swayed Microsoft and Intel to the HD DVD camp. Blu-Ray supports it, but it wasn’t a required option. Turns out this has changed: Managed Copy is now mandatory.

But the bigger feature in my mind in determining the winner is the ability to have both standard DVD and HD DVD content on the same disc. This is called a hybrid disc, and would allow stores to stock one physical title to cover both standard and high definition discs.

I just can’t see stores carrying two copies of every movie. There’s no way Wal-Mart is going to give up that much shelf space (and there’s even less chance that they’ll carry three copies – DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-Ray). So having standard and HD in the same box makes a sense.

Blu-Ray is a better format for computer drives since it can hold a lot more data – but an HD DVD disc has enough space for a 1080p high definition movie, and that’s enough for the purpose it’s designed for.

I bought my first HD DVD movie a few days ago, Serenity. What a disappointment.

Not because of anything to do with the movie – I coudn’t watch it. I couldn’t watch it because I don’t have an HD DVD drive, and Serenity isn’t a hybrid disc.

In my opinion, hybrid should be the default. Consumers should be able to buy an HD DVD disc, and be able to watch the movie anywhere, in any drive. This is technically possible, but the movies coming out so far are not hybrid discs, so you can only play them using an HD DVD player.

It’s going to be a very long time before everyone has HD everywhere. You might have an HD DVD player hooked up to the big TV in the entertainment room, but what about up in the kids room? Nobody wants to buy two copies of a movie in two different formats, and that seems to be the route we’re being sent down.

I stopped buying DVDs over a year ago, when I bought an HDTV. I just didn’t want to buy movies that weren’t taking advantage of my TV. I was happy that I could start buying movies again when HD DVD discs started showing up in stores, but it seems I need to wait for this to get sorted out, because I’m not going to get stuck with a library of movies that I can only play on one expensive player.

I see Warner is starting to release hybrid discs. Let’s hope the retailers can pressure the industry to make hybrid discs the standard.

Last night I tried playing one from my PC just to see what would happen, and it played no problem. No DRM, no authorization, just video.

This is called the analog hole – where something is converted into analog (which generally is not protected, save some sort of Macrovision scheme) and then converted back into digital. You lose a bit of quality, but you also lose any rights management, and depending on the quality of the components involved, the resulting material can be quite good.I’m sure the MPAA would rather Microsoft had included DRM on these files. There’s nothing to stop me from burning a show onto a DVD and giving it to a friend. But they didn’t. Kudos. And also kudos to the Starchoice for not having their PVR add Macrovision to it’s output.

The optical audio cable connecting the XBox 360 to the receiver was dirty, and so it wasn’t making a good connection. This caused the audio to drop out for a few milliseconds every now and then. What it sounded like was that the computer wasn’t able to keep up with audio recording and was causing dropouts, but the problem was refreshingly low tech.

On a related note, I’d been using some cheap S/PDIF optical cables I bought off eBay, but their plastic ends on them have worn down and now they don’t stay in place. This leads to a bad connection, or them simply falling out. I wouldn’t suggest Monster Cables but a step up from the cheapest seems like a good idea.