reesesWeb

Pursuant to an earlier post, I bought the Creative Zen Vision :W player in advance of a trip to NYC last week.

First off, this thing has just about the worst name in the world. It also has an awful splash screen at startup with a big "ZEN" that I would cover up with my hand so the guy sitting next to me wouldn't punch me in the nads.

That said, it's pretty groovy, with some serious downsides that make me think the PMP market is about where the GPS market was in 2004, right around the time the Nuvi came out and solidified things remarkably.

This is the HD STB/PVR that Comcast supplies.

Motorola DCT 6208 product page

Cost = $10/mo, or $3/mo for HD. (Not sure if the box is the same if you just get HD, or if it's the 6200) In Bethesda, MD.

Firewire output is output-only. Use VirtualDVHS on the Mac to record. Not sure about rumors that you can expand capacity with an external firewire diskpack if output-only limitation is true. Appears that most content is not 5c, so there aren't any recording problems right now.

Despite the fact that I hated my Treo 600 after a year of ownership, I bought a Treo 650 soon after its release. My three-day opinion is that I like it more than the 600, but I've made exactly one phone call, and that lasted as long as it took to say,"Hey. I'll meet you there. See you in five minutes."

I spent much of the Saturday after opening the box building a script to receive jpeg images as attachments via email, extracting the attachments, storing them on my server, and then uploading them to Flickr. I monkeyed with exim for SMTP auth and TLS, which is in that category of enjoyable activities called "wasting my life dorking with stupid Linux."

The AcomData External SATA Drive has the distinction of being the very first thing I have ever returned to a store. Ever. I've put up with a lot of expensive dreck just to avoid the inconvenience of gathering up my receipt and packaging, driving to the store, standing in line, and explaining to someone why I should get my money back. AcomData has given me reason to do this.

How did they manage to overcome my sloth?

The drive came with a PCI SATA card with an external connector. I thought this was a nice idea, because not everyone had external SATA or E-SATA connectivity, and for a desktop, the option was pop out one of the PCI slot covers to run the cable out from the motherboard, which isn't a smart idea, but one I was prepared to execute.

I'm fairly happy with the Garmin Nuvi 350. I haven't had one since my Garmin 45 that I got in 1995 (jeez!) back when I was working on marine navigation software. The reason I've done without is that we did cool stuff with GPS charting, and all of the handheld or portable units that offered similar functionality all came up very much wanting.

However, moving back to San Francisco coincided with automobile GPS kits becoming just good enough to tolerate their peccadillos while saving many hours navigating our way around the city.