Posts from — April 2009

The Kill-A-Watt has just been delivered. Less than 24 hours after ordering it, with free ground shipping I might add. Well done Newegg. Unit looks smaller than it does in the photos and is locked up good in it’s very user unfriendly blister pack- Amazon would not be pleased.

After wrenching through with a pair of trusty Fiskars, the device is finally liberated from its translucent enclosure. No battery needed for this gizmo, just plug it into a 120 volt outlet, plug in the device in question and you are good to go.

The first device I tested was a 1TB Lacie external hard drive – 10 watts, whether it was sitting idle or reading/writing data. This particular hard drive does have a small fan, but I have yet to hear it spin up.

The second device I tested was a Sony 40-inch 1080p LCD TV with fluorescent backlight (not newer LED technology). At its off or ‘standby’ setting, the panel used one watt – not bad. Turned on but without a signal power consumption was only 50 watts, I am assuming this was so because the backlight remains off in this state. After firing up the DVR and tuning to Food Network, power consumption increased to 200 watts, where it remained for the entire test. I figured that at a power cost of about $.197/kilowatt, it would cost $.95 to run the panel for 24 hours. Interesting.

Lastly, I brought the Kill-A-Watt over to the newest device in our kitchen: the AeroGarden. Running with its two fluorescent lights on for nearly 18 hours a day raised some concern about its novelty. To my surprise the device only drew about 40 watts with the lights and aerator on (aerator is similar to a fish tank bubbler). Given the ‘on’ time of the device, I determined it costs about $4.50/month to run.

In my short time with the Kill-A-Watt I have been very pleased with it’s ease of use and it’s ability to make transparent just how much energy all the devices in one’s household really use.
Click Here to see cost breakdown of tested devices! (Excel) — Also available as a PDF

April 11th, 2007

Just finished installing the D3 in my ’06 Scion tC this weekend. In addition to the head unit I also installed the Bluetooth adapter/iPod cable/PAC steering wheel control interface and XM tuner. At this point I am still unsure if I am going to install the reverse cam. This is my third Pioneer head unit, but first Navigation unit.

The unit looks very nice installed with the included mounting hardware, much better than in the photos, I might add. The screen is very bright, and the touch interface works very well. The XM interface is very nice, especially when the Nav disk is in loaded, as it will then display station and category logos along with the standard XM track/artist info.

Here are some of the pros and cons I have come up with in the two days I have had to fool around with it:

Pros:

• XM or Sirius, it stinks to have to make a decision on a head unit based on your sat. radio prefs (Eclipse comes to mind here)
• Superb XM interface
• Solid iPod interface with cool iPod scroll wheel on-screen image (although no search function)
• So far the Nav has worked very well
• Vehicle diagnostics are fun, although not for any practical purposes
• Pioneers parametric EQ has always been great, it is even better with the enhanced visualization of the large color LCD
• Great internal sub-woofer controls including high pass filters, as well as low pass output and sub level controls
• Customization options are nice as you can match your cars instrumentation color
• DVD quality is very good
• Phone call quality is very good from the feedback I have gotten from callers (mounted the mic on the right side of my visor with the included clip)
• Night mode: when you flip on your headlights you can choose how dim you want the screen to get, and the navigation screen has a night mode which uses darker colors for the map, and is much easier on the eyes

Cons:

• No ability to have different EQ settings for each source as far as I can tell (source custom EQ)-this is a major disappointment, i.e. XM output is usually very flat compared to CD/MP3 sources, requiring a lot of messing around with the EQ to get it sounding right. Having to change EQ depending on source is a major pain
• No automatic sound levelizer (adjusts volume level depending on road noise)-even my stock Scion/Pioneer head unit had this
• No remote ($15 dollar option at pioneer.com, come on Pioneer, I know it’s an inexpensive unit, but still)
• Some background noise at times, but I have concluded that it does not affect sound quality, as much of it only occurs when no music is playing (i.e. caused by the button tones or nav guidance)
• Having to use two little satellite antennas is silly- I don’t understand why they couldn’t have designed the XM tuner to be able to accept the sat. signal from the Nav antenna, i.e. pull the sat. signal through the IP bus
• I have still not been able to load my phone book into the unit and I tried both my Cingular SonyEricson and my Nextel Blackberry-have checked forums and others are having similar issues, I’m guessing there will be a fix out soon as this is a brand new Bluetooth module
• No HD radio support

Overall I am very satisfied with the sound quality, interface, ease of use, and ability to customize the unit. I just wish it had the source custom EQ and the $170.00 Bluetooth module would load my address book.

UPDATE:
April 15th, 2009

Two years have passed since I wrote this review, figured it was about time to provide an update on the old AVIC D3.

Does it all still work??
Everything works just as well as it did on day one. Aside from one minor occurrence of the nav not recognizing the DVD Map disc, this Pioneer has held its own through -5 degree winter days all the way up to 100+ degree summer heat. The satellite signal is found within seconds after startup, the XM reception never failed (though I dropped the service last month – another story), and all the peripherals are still functioning. I never did install that back-up camera, still in its original packaging, I should probably just list on eBay!

Other thoughts:
Having only one disk drive, occupied by the NAV DVD ROM 100 percent of the time, isn’t really a deal breaker by any means. However, there have instances (long road trip) where a guest would bring a CD (I know, a CD?!) and it was a pain to remove/stow the NAV disc in order to gain access to the drive. This really was not an issue due to the fact that the other 99 percent of the time music was sourced from an iPod. My only other complaint is the lack of a learning feature within the Navigation function. On this type of unit, it would be very easy to integrate some flash memory (512MB would be more than enough) in order to remember preferred routes. By 2009 standards, the iPod interface is a bit outdated. The XM graphics that were pulled from the NAV disc are mostly all now obsolete because of the Sirius/XM merge. Also, the FM radio interface gets the job done, but will not win any awards for usability or eye candy during the process. Even with 3-year-old maps the navigation still works well, and compared to all the portable units I have had the pleasure of using provides a much better experience. Overall, I am still quite pleased with the Pioneer AVIC-D3.

Photos of the Install

April 8th, 2009

10 Years Ago

The year is 1999. Apple releases the iMac DV, a convection-cooled, all-in-one personal computer capable of editing digital video. iMac DV ships with a 400MHz processor, 64MB of RAM, and a 10-gigabyte Ultra ATA internal hard drive. The average cost of hard drive space is roughly $17.95 per gigabyte.

Fast forward to present day. Just for comparison, the current 24inch iMac ships with a 1 terabyte hard drive. Average cost per gigabyte has plummeted to roughly $0.11. A 500 gigabyte hard drive is now one of the more common hard drive sizes, with 1000 gigabytes (1TB) nipping at its heals.

Now, I could get into the technical advancements that made all this possible, but I think it is more interesting to examine what all this storage space will make possible. Think about never needing to delete a file to free up hard drive space, or keeping a real time back up of every single one of your files, for not much more than a days pay. All this is now possible, and it is just going to get less expensive.

Infinite Storage

The thing about 10 years ago was the fact that there really wasn’t much to store on that 10 gigabyte hard drive. Sure, MP3 audio files were certainly gaining in popularity, and the Internet based video revolution was igniting, but no enough consumers were armed with a fast enough Internet connection to really take advantage of any of it. Today, the need for volume storage reaches out to nearly every individual with a computer on his or her desk. Digital still cameras, digital video cameras, music downloads, video downloads, cumbersome operating systems and programs are all driving this need.

What makes all this hard drive storage space a lot more exciting is the advent of google-like search functionality now being built directly into computers operating systems. Apple has had their search function (spotlight) since 2005, while windows just jumped on the bandwagon with Vista (instant search). These system wide integrated search functions work by indexing files in real time and storing a database of both file and content keywords. Here’s an example of how useful these search features are: over a year ago your sister sends you a recipe for a coconut upside down cake, you have no idea when she sent the email and you have no idea what the subject header was – no problem. Just search coconut upside down and within seconds you will have a listing of every document containing those terms. Now imagine being able to find any photo, any word document, any song, anything using this search. Fast forward to 10 years from now, the year is 2019. I would envision we have one solid state hard drive capable of storing hundreds of terabytes of information. Think about how amazing it will be when all it takes to access a photo of your child on her 2nd birthday is a few keywords. Or your thesis you wrote senior year of undergrad – type “thesis” and within seconds you have access to it. Mind you, this little demonstration doesn’t take into consideration any changes in format that may occur in this fictitious 10 year fast-forward, but that is a different conversation altogether. Another important component of all this speedy and accurate searching for files and content is called metadata.

Metadata

Meta what? Metadata is by definition a set of data that describes and gives information about other data. Take a photograph for example, a content driven search engine would return nothing on a photograph unless you personally named the file a descriptive caption. Chances are the file name looks something like this: IMG_6172.jpg – not going to be of any help when searching on terms like 1999 BBQ Cape Cod. However, with the inclusion of metadata one is able to “tag” this photo file with any information that describes the image. Most of the popular photo software can load this data en mass right after loading the photos from the digital camera. Now you can take a roll of photos with the year “1999” Month “June” Place “Cape Cod” and event “Jane’s 4th birthday”. Much of this metadata is also automatically populated with details on the camera used to take the photo, exposure settings, ISO, shutter speed, etc. Also, in the coming years cameras with a function known as geotagging will automatically tag the geographic location the photo was taken. When your digital photo software loads the image, this location will be stored in metadata and 5 years from now when searching for that photo you took in Boston, you will find it with ease.

Safe Keeping

Data stored on the personal computer is now just that, personal. 10 years ago when someone’s hard drive failed leaving all the data lost forever, it most likely was not the end of the world. Today, we store thousands of priceless files on these fickle spinning magnetic plates. As you can imagine, the need for a reliable system to back up these photos, songs, diary entries, etc. has become extraordinarily important. Currently the number of PC users backing up all their files on a daily or weekly basis is unknown, but a 2006 survey conducted by Symantec found that 43% of users had never backed up their computer. Given the exponential cost decreases in external hard drives that has occurred over the past 3 years one could only assume this number has gone down. It is my though that even if these users are backing up, they aren’t doing it regularly or completely. The safest way to backup files locally is to purchase an external hard drive equal to the size of your main hard drive and a backup program daily or weekly. The best backup program will not only backup your files, but your programs and settings as well. In the case of a hard drive failure, the user can simply boot off their external hard drive and restore all that was lost. The advent of system integrated backup such as Apple’s “Time Machine” will certainly provide an easy way for the common PC user to back up their files, but they still need to purchase an external hard drive and enable this feature.

Local backups will also only get you so far, in the case of a natural disaster, fire or flood your data as well as its backup will likely be destroyed. The only way around this is to act like larger corporations and engage in offsite data storage. A number of services exist that provide this offsite storage, but if a large amount of data is in need of safekeeping, it may not be worth the high price tag (iBackup.com gets $599.99 monthly to backup the 1TB hard drive that came with your iMac). A more cost efficient but less secure method is to keep your own removable hard drive to be moved off site. Bus powered compact drives are currently available in 500 gigabyte sizes for less than $100.00. Simply bring this drive with you to work on Monday and back home on Friday to perform a fresh backup. It may be worth while encrypting this drive with a password in case it is lost or stolen.

Conclusion

Just as the personal computer, the advent of endless data storage will revolutionize the way we use computers. We now have instant access to photos, videos, documents, financial records, email conversations as well as the ability to forever archive them.

Of course there will always be the privacy implications when it comes to storing all this data, but this is shared with many of the activities being carried out in the web 2.0 environment. The coming years of personal computing are going to be very exciting, and dirt cheap high capacity storage is just one of reason why.

- Louis Abate