Corrupt Politicians: Little Brother is watching you January 25, 2006
Posted by techandother in Hardware, My Projects, Politics/Legal.add a comment
In this podcast, there is a great discussion of the future of multimedia recordings, it’s really worth a listen, and has some good ideas:
IT Conversations: Jamais Cascio – Personal Memory Assistants
One thing that really struck me was the potential for a “PMA” device to be an anti-corruption device. I thought I’d hash out a quick plan for one: (more…)
Ed Brill and client satisfaction January 11, 2006
Posted by techandother in Hardware, Software, Web Applications.add a comment
Got into a good discussion, wanted to post my comment on my own blog as well.
On the topic of surveys of end user satisfaction with software products:
Overall, I haven’t put too much weight on these types of surveys. What I WOULD be interested in is a survey of end users who have used multiple email systems, and their preference.
It seems like Notes would blow others out of the water, if the end users knew what they were missing. But often they don’t. A perfect example of this is a sametime rollout I was involved in for a small company of about 400 users. No-one understood why we were rolling it out, they were satisfied with what they had. Two months later, we were averaging 10,000 sametime conversations per month, 80% of them business related. About 6 months later, we had a minor error with the server’s hardware, and you’d better believe people missed it.
I think of it like this – people using an inferior application or others are like workers with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. The tools allow them to do more work more quickly, and they are happy with what they have. Then you give them the dump truck and backhoe, which is a better app. Not only can they continue doing the same old thing, but they have the tools to accomplish much more.
The only dependants are the user’s desire to learn how to use their new tools effectively, and the ‘drive factor’. By ‘drive factor’, I mean the choice the user has to make whether to continue putting forward the same amount of effort with the new tools and accomplish more, or accomplish the same goals with less effort.
I think the latter happens a little too much, and this seems to me to be some of the source of the ‘Notes is too complicated’ argument. Not that I think the Notes UI is complicated, I think it is very intuitive. But I think the real argument some of these people are making is, ‘Notes is too complicated…because I don’t need such a capable tool to accomplish the lower goals I have set for myself’. For end users, this is a management problem, but it’s not hard to see this attitude in management, developers, etc.
Consider diagonal size when going to a widescreen TV January 5, 2006
Posted by techandother in Hardware, HowTo, My Projects.add a comment
Here is some advice when looking into some of the newer widescreen-format TV’s… with excel sheet data, of course…
(by the way, 16:9 (for example) is a type of measurement in how the sides of the screen relate to each other. 6 inches tall for every 9 inches wide. This is called aspect. Aspect is marketer’s little weapon against you when they try to make you move from one aspect to another. (more…)
How not to get ripped off on a laser printer November 29, 2005
Posted by techandother in Hardware.2 comments
Laser printers are tricky, but you can simplify things by breaking down the cost of a laser printer over time into three categories:
- The printer itself
- toner
- non-durable items, like the transfer drum
The trick to finding a good, but cost-effective, laser printer is to break down the cost of printing to a per-page cost.
For example, I recently had to find a sub-$150 monochrome laser printer for my work. This falls into the small home office category. I found the following printers from my supplier:
Samsung ML 1610 ($99.99)
Brother HL 2040 ($119.99)
Samsung ML 2010 ($129.99)
OKI B4100 ($143.99)
Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W ($149.62)
My supplier carries toner for all of these printers, but no drum replacement kit for the Samsungs. So immediately we’re down to three printers.
Brother HL 2040 ($119.99)
OKI B4100 ($143.99)
Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W ($149.62)
Next, I looked up the toner cartridges for each of these printers, and how long the toner lasts:
Brother HL 2040
2500 pages
$ 49.87
$ 0.020 per page
OKI B4100
2500 pages
$ 30.10
$ 0.012 per page
Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W
3000 pages
$ 78.84
$ 0.026 per page
Next, I looked up how much the replacement transfer drums cost, and how long they last:
Brother HL 2040
12000 pages
$ 86.77
$ 0.007 per page
OKI B4100
25000 pages
$149.57
$ 0.006 per page
Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W
20000 pages
$ 99.27
$ 0.005 per page
Then, when you combine the two, you have a total-cost-per-page number:
Brother HL 2040
$ 0.027 per page
OKI B4100
$ 0.018 per page
Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W
$ 0.031 per page
Once you know this information, you can safely decide on what printer to get, once you take a look at the following examples:
After printing 0 pages (printer/cost)
Brother HL 2040 ($119.99)
OKI B4100 ($143.99)
Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W ($149.62)
After printing 5000 pages
Brother HL 2040 ($255.88)
OKI B4100 ($234.10)
Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W ($305.84 )
After printing 10,000 pages
Brother HL 2040 ($391.78)
OKI B4100 ($324.22)
Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W ($462.06 )
As you can see, with a little work, you can save a lot of money in the long run by looking at all the factors involved in a laser printer purchase, not just the price. And in the case of these similar-performing printers, the more expensive printer doesn’t always mean you will get more for your money!
Avoid disappointment when looking at an HDTV November 24, 2005
Posted by techandother in Hardware.add a comment
I don’t like marketing departments. It seems like they never stop trying to make their product better than what it really is, while staying technically accurate. What ever happened to having a great product, and just saying ‘we have the best product out there, and this is why:’. Not ‘you need this’ or ‘this unit is the brightest’, (when brightness actually has nothing to do with the product. So basically, throw the marketing aside, and look into it yourself.
I took this advice in looking into a new TV for myself. I found that marketing departments are getting away with promoting qualities in their TV’s that aren’t even desirable, such as contrast ratio. They want you to purchase their unit based on contrast, because it is the easiest thing to improve on, not because it actually means anything.
And as long as we’re on the topic of false-but technically-not-false advertising, I’d like to bring on my most major finding in my own investigations.
I have a 32″ Sony Wega. I’m looking into moving from this 4:3 aspect unit to a 16:9 aspect unit.
Here are the stats for my TV:
32-inch diagonal
4:3 aspect ratio
24 inches wide
18 inches tall
432 square inches
(also 163 pounds. That doesn’t have to do with anything, it’s just fun to point out how ludicrous moving it around is…)
Now, the HDTV signal from comcast is coming in at an aspect of 16:9. That means on my TV, it is displaying an image that measures 18 inches tall and is 32 inches wide. But my screen is only 24 inches wide. So the TV just cuts 4 inches off of each side and you miss out on that part of the signal. That signal you’re paying for. Well that won’t do…
So if I wanted to keep the same square area of screen, but in 16:9 so I don’t lose anything, I would have to do the following:
31.8-inch diagonal
27.7 inches wide
15.6 inches tall
432 square inches
So now that we’re viewing the HDTV signal from Comcast in 16:9, I can see the entire signal being sent to me. In the past, where my TV would have been cutting off the sides of the signal to show it in 4:3, it now shows the entire signal being sent in its native 16:9.
But wait! Something’s wrong here. Because this is 16:9, my “32 inch” 16:9 TV displays people in the movie 2.4 inches shorter!
In effect, a person on my 16:9 TV is the same size as on a “26 inch diagonal” 4:3 TV. I gained extra picture on the sides of the 16:9, but the actual size of what’s being displayed gets smaller on a 16:9 if you compare the 16:9 and 4:3 “32 inch diagonal” TV’s next to each other. This is because the TV’s are still being marketed by diagonal size, but have changed dimensions!
I want to keep the same image height I’m used to, but just get the extra inches on the sides that I’ve been missing. In order to replace my 32″ Sony and keep the same image size, but add the extra picture on the sides, I would have to look into a 16:9 TV with the following specs:
36.7 inch diagonal
32 inches wide
18 inches tall
576 square inches
Whoa! A “36.7 inch diagonal” TV? Yep, if I wan to keep the picture I am used to, but get the benefit of the extra picture on the sides, that’s what I’m looking at. And that’s what you should be looking at if you’re thinking of switching from a 4:3 TV to a 16:9.
So what if you don’t have a 32″ TV? Well, with the help of Excel, I found a shortcut for converting from 4:3 to 16:9, here it is:
It just so happens to work out that no matter what size diagonal your 4:3 TV is, if you take the inches diagonal of the 4:3 (32″, for example) and multiply it by 1.2238 (22.3837% or so), the number you get will be the size diagonally that you will need in your 16:9 so that you have the same screen height as your 4:3.
So why don’t the marketing/advertising departments show this information? Because there’s no way they want to have a “Compare with a 26-inch standard TV” sticker on their expensive “32-inch” 16:9 HDTV. They’d rather have to say ‘Hmm…the “32-inch” 16:9 TV isn’t that much more expensive than the “32-inch” standard TV, I’ll pay a few bucks more and get the 16:9″
But, as I’ve shown, you’re not getting more, you’re getting a TV that, while wider, gives you a picture about 13% smaller than you are used to.
