Physically the device is a slightly wide/retro-looking USB drive. The case is fairly slick and smooth with a “blingy” faint perlesque fleck in the gloss-black paint - reminiscent of a Japanese drift-racer. The case is a little flimsy-feeling (It bows when you squeeze it), but it’s fairly light because of it. The device does get slightly warm when connected though (regardless of the interface, it seems).

Here’s the two main things I wanted to check-out:

1. Can it operate on port-power alone?
2. Is the USB interface actually USB2.0 HiSpeed? (So many junky things from eBay aren’t infact HiSpeed despite claiming it)
3. What actual read/write speeds can I see on my PC using both eSata USB interfaces?

Can it operate on port-power alone?

No, at least not with my motherboard. The OCZ website states:

“Not all motherboards/notebooks with eSATA ports are powered. Included USB cable is needed to power the Throttle in this case”

My motherboard (a Foxconn G33M with a 3GHz Intel e8400 Core2 Duo CPU and 4GB of DDR2 800 memory) has no hardwired eSata ports on the rear panel, but I’ve made an eSata port o the case using a bolt-on socket connected to one of the internal Sata ports. It’s more than likely that certain motherboards with proper eSata ports in the ATX IO back panel area will probably drive it. Nevertheless I can’t find any reference to a “powered eSata” standard with a cursory googling. It always struck me as odd that they didn’t do this from the get-go, even just putting the poor, neglected 3.3v line into the eSata plug standard.

Anyway, just using the USB cable for power while the device is connected to eSata is pretty simple and straightforward - At least you don’t have to try and have a 4-pin Molex plug hanging-out of the case or use an external wall-wart for power supply.

Is the USB interface 2.0 HiSpeed (480Mb/s)?

Yes, plugging it into a Macintosh and looking at the System Profiler USB details pane shows the device as “up-to 480Mb/s”.

So many supposedly USB2.0 HiSpeed devices sold on eBay are infact USB1.1 at best - the vendors just rely on MS-Windows customers being unaware of the actual transfer mode of the device. Mind you, these cruddy devices tend not to have much in the way of “Branding” about them.

What are the real-world read/write speeds on each interface?

I used a sample 2.6GB MPEG2 file and copied this onto and off the drive using “dd”. The content of the file is fairly unimportant, but given the compression, it has nearly-random entropy. I made sure the disk was unmounted and physically disconnected/reconnected between tests. Not the most rigorous test, but I’m fairly confident the results give a good understanding of real-world behaviour:

• USB Write: 11MB/s
• eSata Write: 13.9 MB/s
• USB read: 35.6 MB/s
• eSata read: 85.8 MB/s

Summary

Works pretty-much as promised. eSata write speed is a little below expectations, but still pretty fast. Not regretting buying this little toy!

Ok, the headline’s a bit of a terse mouthful and this has undoubtedly been covered “Somewhere” on Teh Intarweb (Not that couple of haphazard google searches would reveal at least), But I wanted to have a concise record for next time I forget how to do this.

What we’re doing here:

This short howto will conver the rudiments of connecting a computer to The Internet through a bluetooth connection to a mobile phone on the Australian Three (Hutchison) 3G celular network.

The Phone:

The phone being used must have Bluetooth capability. Given that Three’s network is 3G, the phones tend to be of the “newe/pricier” variety and so just about all of them will have Blutooth. It’s really up to the reader to be sure though.

Many people leave Blutooth off for security and battery-life issues, so the functionality obviously now needs to be turned-on (again, this is a phone-specific procedure, so it’s up to you to figure it out).

The Computer:

Again, the computer too needs bluetooth. It’s pretty uncommon for most desktop computers to have this built-in but most modern laptops have it already. If your computer does not have Bluetooth, you can buy many little USB blutooth modules all over the place (try eBay). Unfortunately the cheaper ones tend to have nasty driver/support software, but they should be good enough for this purpose.

Bluetooth pairing:

As a wireless protocol that aims to surplant wired communications, there are special considerations made in Bluetooth to ensuring the communication is secure (Specifically encryption and authentication of connections). As it is a fairly involved process to establish this security, it’s only done once when devices first “meet” and the credentials saved for future connections. This procedure is called “device pairing”. When pairing a computer to a phone, usually either the computer prompts the user to enter a random number sequence, or it generates one itself. This digit sequence is sent to themobile phon, which then prompts the user to type them in. If the numbers match, then the devices are paired and “truest” each others identity.

Dial-up networking profile:

Bluetooth carries many different types of informationeach specific function is called a “profile”. The profile we’re interested in is called “dial-up networking”. Through your computer’s Bluetooth configuration tool, you need to start the dial-up networking profile. Once started, your computer should prompt you to entter login details will include some of the following details:

• Access point: “3netaccess” (or you could try 3services, but i think that’s for Planet3 services only)
• Phone number: *99# (Star,ninety-nine, hash)
• User name: leave blank
• Password: leave blank

So, I can get mobile broadband without a card/key?:

Well, the broadband’s not that “broad” going through Bluetooth for a start. Also, mobile phone companies charge a premium for “thethered” Internet access (Using a phone as a modem for a computer). The dedicated cards/keys are much cheaper, but still a lot more expensive than DSL or other wired Internet options.

So, hope that all helps, good luck!

In contemporary “Gadget press” (which is usually one bloke in his basement with a handicam), one of the most popular things to do is an “unboxing” - That is: to film what happend when you take some new doodad out of the box it comes in (and what comes in the box, etc.). This sounds incredibly dull, but some companies go to great lengths to give customers good “Out Of Box Experiences” (”OOBEes”).

Another popular trend in contemporary advertising is the enigmatic “viral” advertising campaign - That is: presenting some engaging online content with the intent it’ll spread between people online through “This is cool!…” emails, etc. Eventually when the content is on peoples minds a lot, the association with whatever the marketers are pushing is revealed and hopefuly this follows-through in the pre-existing publicity of the pre-launched content. This is somewhat analogous to a magic trick’s setup, reveal and prestige phases. Often, however, “viral” campaigns are just poorly constructed “faux-grassroots” efforts that get derided as “astroturf”.

A third concept with the young things nowadays is the “mashup” - that is: Taking two or more seemingly unrelated and often incompatible concepts or entities and forcing them together in a creative way to produce a distinct derivative work. This originated with people beat-mixing two songs together over the top of each other concurrently, which can often produce some surprisingly listenable results. More recently people have been “mashing-up” different web systems like Google, Yahoo and YouTube.

This is possibly the ultimate culmination of all this: An astroturf viral campaign mashed-up with a faux “unboxing” video. It kind-of works except the product is possibly the least prominent concept of the clip (It’s fairly cute though).

The explanation’s on the Technivator site.

Electronic Arts (EA) have obviously enough time to scratch themselves to study some things going on in the current marketplace:

• The cartoony mayhem of Valve’s Team Fortress 2 is popular and fun.
• EA’s “Battlefield” franchise has been popular in the past and could do with a new installment.
• The “Casual gaming” phenomenon made popular by Nintendo’s Wii is taking-off in big ways.
• Casual players tend to play free, bundled or pirated games.

To this end, they’ve mixed it all up in a bucket (with the eggs on top) and come-up with “Battlefield Heroes” (Have a look at the two videos for a taste of what it’s about):

http://www.battlefield-heroes.com

Lawdy! eBay/PayPal’s latest spam e-newsletter just casually asserts that in two stages they’re going to cease supporting any payment method other than PayPal:

From 21 May you must offer PayPal on all your listings as well as currently permitted payment methods.
From 17 June you will only be able to offer PayPal on your listings and pay on pick up (i.e.paid for when picking up the item).

Pay on pick up can only be offered in conjunction with PayPal. No other payment methods will be permitted.

A small number of exclusions will apply to these changes.

… ermmm…

Come again?!

Now, this is a good and bad thing for both buyers and sellers: I’m a great believer in well-implemented e-commerce systems like Google Checkout, Amazon Marketplace, PayPal, MoneyBookers, PayMate, etc. mainly because of the “invoicing” model opposed to the “I’ll open my purse and you just take what you want… repeatedly” model as-used by credit-cads… I mean credit-cards.

Paypal also has a really great insurance/guarantee system for eBay purchasers. Basically you’re covered against fraud of up-to $300-odd if paying through PayPal. More trusted vendors have even higher guarantees.

Infact this mandate will only have positive impact on me as a (very small-time) seller as I’ve always accepted direct deposit and cheque (an ancient promissory-note system of funds transfer that takes about 2 weeks and several dollars to complete), but only because some of the less tech-savvy customers objected to/were afraid of PayPal. I vastly preferred PayPay due to its guarantees, speed and simplicitly.

The problem is that there is now only PayPal. The aforementioned other payment systems are technically just as good (some claim better), but eBay has deliberately refused to allow direct integration into their site. In the meantime, their own PayPal system is heaviliy integrated and hard to get away from. Google has previously griped about not being let into the “eBay trading floor”, but this has always sounded a bit like a half-argument while external payment systems were allowed but not supported. Now that they’re explicitly forbidden, I think Google’s (and the others’) case’s may hold some legal water.

In the long run, I believe this is a foolish move from eBay’s perspective. It’s quite short-sighted in that they seem to be saying “We get good cash from PayPal, so if we ban other methods then we’ll get better cash from PayPal… right?!” More likely is that someone will come-up with a better auction market than eBay and their bubble will burst. This may have already started with the recent hikes in seller comissions turning-off a lot of vendors. Another possible contributory nail in the coffin is that eBay has for a long time had a pretty nasty website layout, which hasn’t improved much over time (It’s also been fairly resistant to 3rd-party web-applications when they start looking like they’ll affect eBay’s business - like auction-sniping tools). “Who could possibly come-up with a viable competitor?”

Well, first cab off the rank is Google, of course. Google has a galaxy of talented web-developers all jostling for slick “web-2.0″ developments. Google’s been spurned before with the Google Checkout system too, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve been developing a secret marketplace system for a while now.

Amazon’s marketplace system is arguably already replacing eBay - many more “serious” vendors are there already hawking their wares successfully and in good volume. However Amazon Marketplace is a much more “heavy weight” offering than eBay (don’t forget: eBay was originally started for bubblegum-card trading and other collectable trinkets).

Craigslist has been running for ages too and does a lot of the “lower-end” stuff you see on eBay already too (Classifieds things like “Used dishwasher for sale - pick-up only”, etc.) . However Craigslist can be a confusing mish-mash of data-dense, information-light pages and often the controversies (”meet market” image or den of paedophiles?) turn people off gettng into it. It also has no support for payment systems, this is up-to the end-users to sort-out between themselves.

There may well be others, maybe Telstra/Sensis will get the online carcass of The Trading Post to fly (I honestly doubt that). There are still a swarm of “Web 2.0″ start-ups swirling-around and one may just hit the sweet-spot in the market, you never know.

Only time will tell, I suppose, but in the meantime, there’s always PayPalSucks to help disgruntled customers rage at them.

Update( 10-May-2008): Seems the Reserve Bank ofAustralia’s getting worried about a retailer appearing to not accept legal tender for transactions: RBA wary of eBay’s PayPal push (ABC).

Whelp, title says it all, really.

Royal Mint’s new coin designs.

Not really news, but I thought I might record a couple of the obvious-in-function but differently named rip-offs of the US bargain site Woot!: The similarly named Zazz! and the less catchy but more meaningfully named Catch of the Day.

The first site, Zazz!, which is more obviously named similarly with a snappy single-syllable (But who do you know says “Zazz! What a time I’m having!” unlike the onomatopoeic “Woot!”) . This has been around for a while, but generally sells some less-attractive things like Digital photo frames, USB disk drives and other tacky knickknacks.

They also have the “bag of crap” grab-bags every now and then to shift some of their less popular items in bulk. I bought one recently as a laugh to see what I’d get. For $35 I got an LED tea light candle, a helicopter alarm clock (alarm triggers a flying toy to annoy you out of bed) and a “flat” speaker (which is itself about an inch thick and built into a ~2-inch think media-player case). All in all, notionally the items individual sale prices summed to more than $35, but I wouldn’t voluntarily buy any of them if I’d known what they were beforehand. At least I’ve got a few stocking-stuffers for this Christmas now.

The second site, which I just found-out about today from some PayPal(AU) spam is Catch of the Day. Although it’s still and obvious Woot!-alike, it has a more meaningful, if less hip/cool name. The slogan’s not exactly a champion whippet either: “One product every 24 hours” (Hmmmm!).

Sofar I’ve only seen a little of the stuff they sell, but it seems of a similar class to what Zazz! wheel-out most of the time (However with a possibly more “girly” target market) .

Sometimes they do come-out with some good stuff though. Friends of mine bought a cheap LCD TV through Zazz! and I’m kicking myself for not getting a natty folding bike they once offered (There was the tentative fantasy I might get one in my bag-o-crap - no such luck!).

This is basically a fancy-sounding French version of baked beans with sausages. A “real” cassoulet involves more futzing than this recipe but really it’s a peasant dish originally anyway. Like most peasant food, it’s rustic, filling, tasty and warming (I’m a sucker for stews and casseroles too). This recipe was stolen and mangled from ABC’s Delicious magazine, april 2005, p.112.

Ingredients:

• Some good olive oil
• 2 to 4 good, flavoursome sausages (I usually use chorizo or smoked kranski from the fantastic Meatways butchery at Kambah Village shops)
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 red capsicum
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 400g tin of chopped tomatoes
• 1 tsp paprika (I use a smoked paprika - you used to be able to get a large tub of Krio Krush brand from Mother Nature’s supermarket in Tuggeranong Hyperdome)
• 2 tbs finely chopped flat-leaf parsley (or not, if you can’t be bothered wasting a whole bunch from the supermarket for only 2 tablespoons in the end. Don’t ever use dried parsley - it’s futile!)
• 1/2tsp sugar (caster if you’ve got it, but the type’s not drastically important)
• 150ml stock (chicken, beef, veal or vegetable - or just water)
• 800g canned cannellini beans (borlotti or pretty-well any canned beans you like can substitute) - rinse and drain
• 1/2 cup (or thereabouts) breadcrumbs

Method:

Slice and fry your sausages in a saucepan with a little oil. Softer/fattier sausages may need to be fried whole and sliced afterwards (small sausages like chipolatas can go in whole). Remove the sausages and set aside. If you’re using very fatty sausages, drain-off al but 2tbs of fat from the pan.

Now might be a good time to fire-up your oven to “Moderate” (about 180-ish celcius).

Fry the onion and capsicum in the pan used for the sausages until softened. Add the garlic, sugar, paprika, stock/water parsley and tomatoes. Season with salt and pepper and bring to the boil, stirring. Simmer over a low heat for a further 10 minutes then stir-in the beans and sausages (be fairly gentle with the beans, otherwise you’ll end-up with something like Mexican refried beans).

Transfer the mixture to a suitably-sized casserole dish and top with a thin layer of breadcrumbs (just enough so you can’t see the cassoulet below). If you like, spray or drizzle a little oil or put some knobs of butter on top, then bake for 30 minutes.

When baked, bring the casserole to a trivet on the table and serve from there.

You can easily fiddle-around adding any “stew-ready” vegetables along with the capsicum et. al. The one pictured here had some left-over mushrooms, eggplant and zucchini in it (I sliced and grilled the eggplant first).

Delicious!

I was after a rock cake recipe, so I borrowed one of my mum’s treasured recipe books. You can tell it’s a favourite as it’s stuffed with clippings, is falling to bits and is liberally coated in dried ingredients.

The book is the CWA’s “The Esk Valley Cookbook: Treasured Recipes of the Countrywomen of the Esk Valley Group in Tasmania”. It’s full of cool and nutty recipes like “Brain Rissoles”, the classic “Curried Sausages” and the somewhat labour-intensive “Sausage Patties with Pineapple”. The recipe I’m using is the basic rock cake recipe but modified slightly (no peel, just sultanas and currants for a start).

(Makes 20)

Ingredients

• 250g self-raising flour
• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/3 cup sugar
• Pinch salt
• 125g butter or margarine
• 1 cup sultanas or currants
• 2 eggs
• 1/3 cup milk
• extra sugar

Method

• Cream butter and sugar togetger with a spoon or better an electric mixer/egg-beater.
• Sift the flour, cinnamon and salt together into a mixing-bowl and work-in the creamed butter and sugar with your hands until you get to a fine breadcrumb consistency.
• Add the fruit and mix well.
• Beat the eggs and add to the mixture
• While mixing-in eggs, add just enough milk to make a moist, stiff consistency. If too soft, the cakes will spread while cooking instead of retaining shape.
• Place 3 teaspoons of mixture in rough shapes on greased trays. Leave enough space between each for spreading.
• Sprinkle cakes with a little extra sugar.
• Bake at 190 degrees Celsius for 10-20 minutes depending on the cake size. Loosen while hot. Allow to cool on tray.

A few days ago Apple released next year’s spin on iLife - their “home” computer applications suite. The tool that’s changed most is iMovie. Infact, according to Saint Steve, it’s actually a complete redesign and rewrite. The name’s lost the superfluous “HD” suffix also too (It doesn’t “think” in SD any more, but can export to low-res formats if you want). I got to have a play with this tool today, so here are some of my experiences

Basically I was eager to use iMovie08 as the copy of iMovieHD that came with my MacBook didn’t quite do what it promised. It suggested that I should be able to re-render video at variable forward/backward speeds, cut-edit videos and provide transition effects between clips. In the end I think I got it to do one cut (but it was tricky working-out where the cut-markers should go), but it wouldn’t speed-up clips or do transitions (it was always a jump to black instead of a fade). So I got frustrated and bored and as a result I gave it away. Seeing his Steveness doing all sorts of whizz-bang with iMovie08 got me interested again. When the opportunity came to try it out, I couldn’t resist.

…and then it began to disappoint…

iMovie flat-out refused to ingest the “nasty and should be cheap/legal for anything to ingest” MOV files my Kodal happy-snapper camera produced. Admittedly it seems that part of the problem is that the files my camera produces (with “MPEG-4″ video and u-law audio) are probably “Windows specials” - that is - A special Microsoft Windows-Media-derived set of codecs. When I first used the camera’s video functionality, I was a little surprised it produced a “Mac format” of a Qucktime MOV file (I’d expected a Windows-style .AVI container with some nasty consumer-level MPEG-1 or similar). Seems that they may have been producing the nasty Microsoft-coded video after all, just in a MOV container. This may also be the reason the fancy video effects wouldn’t work in iMovieHD: The codecs are nasty.

Anyway after transcoding to DV (Which took ages - possibly realtime for a 22-minute source clip on a dual-core 2GHz MacBook), I was able to ingest the result into iMovie08 (This also took ages). The next problem was that a lot of the fancy effects don’t seem to be there any more (non-realtime video speeds). You also don’t seem to have easy control over some parameters (e.g. it seems you can set the default time for new video transitions to occur in, but you generally can’t change the times for existing transitions unless you change them all). I suspect this was all done in the name of simplicity (This is a beginner/amateur level product after all) and it’s not a major problem.

I took the video I was trying to edit before and within a couple of hours of learning/using came-up with the following monstrousity:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXQ205h2dIk

(Hope you enjoyed it!)