Posts 870 to 877:

Zen Nano Plus

Kim and I have been wanting to get small Digital Audio Players (DAPs) for a while now, mainly to listen to while running.  Kim has been running with a CD player which isn’t fun, and I’ve been running with nothing; and I’m so out of shape that I want to quit with every step, so I really wanted something to listen to, so I’d have something to focus on besides how much I want to give up.

After researching the myriad different brands and models available, I settled on the Creative Zen Nano Plus.  It’s got a gig of space, an FM tuner, a recordable line-input, and folder-based navigation.  I got it at Best Buy for $110 two weeks ago, but the next week Wal-Mart and Circuit City had it on sale for $70, so I took it back and we both got one at Circuit City.

My only significant complaints about it are that I wish the screen were bigger (or just that they’d use more than 1 line of it for displaying the song title); I wish the song title was taken from the filename rather than from the ID3 tag (since it uses folder-based navigation after all); and the line-input is one of those stupid 3/32-inch jacks instead of a standard 1/8-inch jack (but I’ll probably rarely use that so it’s just kind of an annoyance).

The included earbuds are white, which apparently makes you cooler since they’re the same color as iPod earbuds; but it also makes you more of a target for thieves, since the white earbuds are a sign that the mark is carrying an expensive iPod.  But where I live, the bulls are more of a problem than the thieves, so whatever.  Anyway as with all earbuds, I can’t seem to use them without them either falling out or really hurting my ears, so I picked up a pair of those headphones that slip over your ears and that position the speaker sideways into your ear.  They work much better and don’t hurt.

The MP3 player that I really wanted was the MobiBLU Cube, but it has two issues that I can’t tolerate: a 2-second gap between tracks, and a failure to sort songs alphabetically within folders except for the first 6 characters of the filename -- in other words your albums only play in jumbled order.  MobiBLU is releasing the Cube 2 at the end of June, so depending on price and whether these issues are fixed maybe I’ll check one out.

Posted by Anthony on 2 replies

Lug Nuts

On Sunday I got a flat tire.  My car has a full-size spare, which I was quite glad for on this, my first flat tire in 7 years with the Golf.

But Golfy’s tire wrench isn’t one of those huge plus-sign-shaped ones that’s 18 inches long on both bars.  Instead it’s shaped like an allen wrench, and is only about 10 inches long.  I never thought this would have been a problem until I had to use it to loosen the lug nuts.

It was virtually impossible to get them loose.  Of course they’re tightened with pneumatic drills at the garage that installs them, and they also appeared to have a slight amount of rust on them.  I pulled with all my might and they didn’t budge even slightly.  Kim and I both tried standing on the wrench, to no avail.

I started thinking about opening my phone and getting our GPS coordinates, and calling my parents or one of my siblings, asking them to bring us some stronger arms and/or a different tire wrench, when I had one last idea.  I stood on the wrench again, then jumped up off it, and slammed my heel back down on it.  Finally the nut gave way!

The interesting thing is that it made a terrible screeching noise when it first loosened, and upon tightening the nuts they made the same noise at the very end of the tightening process.  I’ve heard the noise before, of course, at any number of auto repair shops throughout my life, but I always figured it was the sound of the drill hitting its past-my-current-torque-setting level of tightness.

So why and how do the lug nuts make that noise?

(OK, technically, they are lug bolts on my car, but I’ve never actually heard anyone call them anything but "lug nuts.")

Posted by Anthony on 4 replies

Spinning Optical Illusion

Check out this optical illusion.  It appears to be spinning, but it’s not.  (The JPEG image format does not support animation.)

Posted by Anthony on 2 replies

Custom Route Planning with Google Maps

For a while now I’ve wished that Google Maps would let me create a route by just clicking on the map to create my own points.  Google Maps will give me directions from point A to point B, but I don’t always like the route it chooses; often I’d like to be able to say "Go from point A to point B using a route which goes through point C on the way."

Well WalkJogRun.net does just that.  You just click your starting point, and it creates a marker there; you then keep clicking (creating new markers) along the route you want to create, until you get to your destination.

It’s designed primarily for planning exercise routes as you might have guessed, but it does allow you to set the speed for your route, so it will display the estimated time properly based on the length of the route.

Apparently the site has been around since late 2003, so I’m pretty late on discovering it.  On the other hand it originally used Yahoo and Mapquest maps, and I think we can all agree that the old way of online mapping was barely worth using at all (i.e. non-draggable maps that require the whole page to reload every time you change your view) now that we know the One True Path.

Posted by Anthony on 4 replies

New Apple Ads

Apple introduced some new TV commercials on Monday and I think they’re pretty funny.  You can watch them on the Apple website.

It’s kind of annoying how they present it as "The Mac vs. The PC" when it’s really about Mac vs. Windows.  I run a PC, yet none of the PC-based problems mentioned in the ads affect me at all, because my PC runs Linux, not Windows.

But other than that, the ads are good -- they’re funny and they’re pretty much completely accurate.

Posted by Anthony on 3 replies

Jack Bauer's Cell Phone

Over time we’ve seen Jack plug any and all manner of media into his cell phone -- memory cards, 5-and-a-quarter-inch floppies, clay tablets... why can’t he plug the darn recording into there and just transmit it back to CTU already??!?

Posted by Anthony on 2 replies

The DaVinci Code Debunked

McLean Bible Church is a church in Washington DC that Kim used to attend while she lived there.  Every week they post the new sermon on their website so that anyone who wants to can listen to it, and Kim and I do that pretty often.  The senior pastor Lon Solomon is one of the best preachers I’ve heard.

Today we listened to his sermon The DaVinci Code Debunked and it was really interesting.  I haven’t read the book nor seen the movie, but I certainly haven’t escaped the constant hype surrounding them.  On The Factor the other night, Bill O’Reilly grilled the author, Dan Brown, and it’s clear that Brown has no evidence to back up his outrageous claims about Jesus and the Bible.  Pastor Lon’s sermon made that abundantly more clear.

Update: And language-nazi that I am, I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to stand too much of the book after having read The Dan Brown Code.

Posted by Anthony on 3 replies

Knickerbockers?

When I was younger, we had this toy called knickerbockers, or maybe nickerbockers (no "k").  It was just two hard plastic balls connected by a string that was about 12-18 inches long.  The balls were about the size of a golf ball and were brightly colored (orange?).

This strange device also came with one other piece, a small flat plastic stick with a hole in one end, which was the handle for the device.  You pulled the center of the string (as a loop) through the hole in the handle, and then put the balls through the loop in the string so that the string was then locked onto the handle.

The idea was, you would hold the handle out in front of you, so the two halves of the string both hung straight down below the handle, with the balls at the bottom.  You’d then rapidly move the handle up and down, causing the balls to swing apart, out to the sides, and up to the top above the handle, each one forming a half-circle, where they’d then slam together.

I think the point of the toy was the cool sound that the balls made when they clicked together.  Or, the cool sound they made when you separated them from the handle and threw them really hard into the air across your yard.

Anyway, I haven’t seen this toy anywhere for years, and I can’t seem to find it online.  Does anybody else remember this toy, or better yet, know where it could be bought today?

Posted by Anthony on 13 replies

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