Small and cute

Recently an interesting package was delivered to my office and it turned out to be San Disk a Sansa Clip mp3 music player.

The most striking thing about the player was its tiny size (I’ve seen bigger postage stamps) and the fact that it offers a playing time of 15 hours from what must be a very tiny battery indeed.

The Sansa Clip can store and play music in a number of formats and also audio books, of which there are apparently a huge number available. By searching on Google for ‘free mp3 audio books’, I found a sample chapter from a classic book, which I was able to download and play successfully.

There was a leaflet in the player’s box about www.audible.co.uk where you can find and buy any number of modern bestsellers for you listening pleasure. I was put off by the high prices on that particular site but I’m sure that, if you shopped around, you could get audio books far more reasonably.

I was a little surprised to find the Sansa Clip didn’t have any bundled software for use in ripping music from compact disc and transferring it and other files from computer to the player.

I guess the designers thought that most people would already have an application to manage their sound files and that including their own proprietary software would be gilding the lily.

I have been using Windows Media Player (WMP) for my needs which are, it must be admitted, pretty meagre when it comes to playing sound through my computer. I found that WMP recognised the Sansa Clip when I plugged it into my computer.

Copying music to the player was as easy as selecting the albums I wanted from WMP’s music library and then using the program’s synchronise feature to copy them over to the Sansa Clip.

Using the player is easy enough and I soon managed to find and play the albums I had copied onto it. The FM radio and voice recorder were likewise quite easy to use and, if I ever had any trouble finding my way through the menus, I could just press the Home button on the front of the unit to be taken back to the beginning.

The sound quality provided by the player is not bad at all, in spite of the fact that I chose the maximum compression setting when converting albums to mp3 format. The sound is not going to compare to what you’ll get out of a decent set of headphones and a HiFi but, then again, you’re not going to be able to clip the HiFi to an armband or your top pocket.

At only ,92 of an ounce, whatever that might be in metric, the Sansa Clip is very nice and light and easy to carry. It seems to be decently made and the only slight worry, on the unit I played with at least, was that the USB socket was quite tight and required a bit of force whenever I wanted to plug in the cable to recharge it.

The unit I had was the 1Gb version which could probably store something like 25 albums, going by my experience. Those should be available for about R620, with the 2Gb version costing about R780 and a new 4Gb version on the way.

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Keeping track of the Top 10

There seem to be people who will make lists when left to themselves and there are people who are not natural list makers.

I fall into the latter camp, unfortunately, and sometimes come unstuck due to the fact that things that are supposed to be done are not done or done in the wrong order, which is sometimes worse. I did make a resolution to improve myself but have so far not managed to locate exactly the right kind of diary.

The list keepers write detailed lists of everything and never arrive at the supermarket without a clue about what they went to get. They never have to buy toilet paper as a precaution in case they’ve run out and have to resort to newsprint or pages out of the telephone directory.

They even write lists for fun and, although I didn’t quite believe Harry when he told me, they can be amusing and informative for the rest of us. One that he recommended to me was List Universe at www.listverse.com, which has top-ten lists on just about any subject.

Want to know who the top ten people to die under the age of 25 were? List Universe can help. The site is the brainchild of Jamie Frater and you should be warned that it is seriously addictive and will likely steal more time out of your day than load-shedding.

Top 10 Famous Deaths Caused by Animals is a list which was recently added to the site and includes the fact that that King Alexander I of Greece died after being bitten by a monkey which attacked his dog while they were walking in the park. The list of the Top 10 Common Misconceptions reveals that, contrary to popular belief, a duck’s quack actually does echo.

Quite a number of the lists include video clips which you’ll need broadband to appreciate. One great list is of television news goofs and includes a clip of a presenter introducing someone with a unique quality who had been up Mount Everest; “…but he’s gay…excuse me, he’s blind.”.

Another very interesting site based on lists is Jonathan Harris’ www.tenbyten.org which samples international news sites on an hourly basis and displays a 10x10 grid of pictures corresponding to the 100 most frequently occurring words that hour in the news.

You can click on any of the pictures to see what word they represent and what story or stories they were contained in. There are links back to the original publications which carried the stories and you can read them if you want to.

I reckon 10x10 is a really clever little site for getting a feel about what is currently in the news and what was in the news at any point going back to November 2004. I would have liked a search feature to find stories containing a particular word, but that’s a small quibble.

Another of Jonathan’s sites is www.wordcount.org which contains a list of the 86800 most commonly used words in the English language, ranked in order of how commonly they are used. You only get one point if you guessed that the commonest word is ‘the’ but you get the grand prize if you knew that the 86799^th most commonly used word would be ‘recrossed’ and that the 86800^th would be ‘conquistador’.

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Using shock tactics

Having written for the last couple of weeks about the latest electronic gadgets on display at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I had intended to move on to something else today.

That was before I came across a gadget so compelling that I decided I had to share it with you. It’s the one gadget I’ve seen in recent times that I would buy in a heartbeat if I were allowed to import one and could convince my bank manager how badly I needed it.

Other gadgets, such as GPS units, compact notebook PCs, digital video recorders and flat screen televisions would all be nice to have, as far as I’m concerned. When it comes to Taser’s stun gun (www.taser.com) with leopard skin-finish and musical holster, however, we’re talking actual need instead of mere desire.

It would be hard to imagine a more useful combination which, according to the blurb, “offers you both security and music while on the go”. Sounds absolutely ideal to me.

You can get the 15cm, 150g Taser C2 in Leopard, Red Hot, Fashion Pink and Black Pearl finishes at the bargain price of $349. It works by firing two darts, which are attached to the gun with wires, and shocking the hell out of the target with electricity from the built-in battery pack.

The idea is that the electric shock temporarily incapacitates an attacker allowing the user time to run away. The unit can be used against targets up to 4,5m away and hitting something at that rage is made a lot easier by the built-in laser sighting system.

I guess the hope is that one will never need to use such a device but the same doesn’t go for the $72.99 holster with the built-in MP3 player. With 1GB of memory, it won’t be able to hold your entire music collection but it should hold enough of a selection of tunes to get you through the day.

I reckon users would be wise to choose a selection of tracks to keep them calm and to avoid songs like Things That Go Bump In The Night or Mack The Knife. I Will Survive, by Gloria Gaynor, should be probably be included to be listened to if the you-know-what hits the fan.

The effectiveness of the technology was shown when Sky News recently showed footage of it being tested on North Wales’ notorious Chief Constable Richard Brunstrom. Luckily for him, someone caught him before he hit the ground.

I first became aware of that there were consumer-model Tasers at womenonguard.com, which is a site with advice and equipment for women to use to defend themselves. Three pepper spray lipsticks for the price of two; that sort of thing.

One gem on the site was a video with a dead-serious person demonstrating the Taser C2 by zapping a picture of Osama Bin Laden. I’m not sure what tune she was playing to herself at the time.

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Going gadget crazy at CES

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) took place last week and has left gadget freaks with plenty to lust after.

One of the early developments just before the show was that Warner Bros committed itself to releasing its high-definition DVDs in the Blu-ray format only. The company had been a major supporter of the competing HD DVD format and their move may have the eventual effect of blowing it out of the water.

I freely confess to not knowing the fine differences between the two technologies but I do know that having two formats did sow many seeds of confusion in consumers’ minds. The choice of player was especially complicated by the fact that film studios supported their own pet formats.

You either had to take a chance that the movies you would want to see would work in the player you chose, or you waited to see which format would win. Now, with Warner’s announcement, the balance seems to have tipped the way of Sony’s Blu-ray format.

It will simplify things for consumers if there is only one high-definition DVD format to choose from. Some might argue that HD DVD is a superior format but Blu-ray has the coolest name and I suspect that could be the differentiating factor which has led to its success.

Also on the show are two GPS systems for tracking the location of pets and others. The tiny devices, by Zoombak and Pocketfinder, transmit a position signal via cellpho nenetwork to a central point and allow users to view an Internet map showing the dog’s current location.

I guess that the units will only work in the USA for the foreseeable future, due to the fact that they use the mobile network. There is monthly service fee of about $15 on both product offerings, but it should be worth it to be able to keep track of treasured pets or the more forgetful members of the family.

There were also a wide variety of digital video recorders including some which can receive electronic program information over the air and be set to record programs based on selections you make. Of course, DSTV’s PVR decoder does the same thing but the company has steadfastly refused to bring out a slimmed-down service for households that don’t need to view two channels and record a third at the same time.

On the show were gadgets with fancy features and price tags and there were ones which sounded impossibly cheap. The SanDisk Sansa Clip MP3 player offers 4Gb of memory and an FM radio for $79; I wonder how much it’ll be by the time it gets here.

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Going wireless at Christmas

Last year saw the introduction of what is probably the perfect Christmas tree for gadget freaks.

Luckily for my budget, perhaps, I only came across the device after Christmas while researching the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) which will be on in Las Vegas this coming week.

CES sounds like heaven for the gadget lover with around 2700 exhibitors from 140 countries exhibiting their new products on stands occupying 1,8 million square feet of floor space.

There’s going to be electronics for every conceivable purpose and very likely some inconceivable ones too. Broad product categories will include audio, gaming, cameras, mobile phones, television, portable video and audio players and GPS.

An advance write-up on the show revealed that one of the exhibitors will be a company called Powercast, who have found out to transmit power wirelessly to devices with their technology built-into them.

They apparently launched their radio frequency harvesting technology at last year’s show and, although adoption by manufacturers has been a bit slow, a Christmas tree with wirelessly-powered lights (standing in a ‘gold-finished’ urn) was launched in time for Christmas.

I’m quite excited by the thought that, one day, I might be able to eliminate the tangle of cables which currently power the peripherals connected to my computer. According to reports, RF harvesting only works for small things like cellphones at the moment, but I’m sure that that will change.

I see that there is already a docking station, intended for use with Ipods, which transmits music signals to its external speakers via radio instead of wires. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for a set of wireless speakers for my PC.

Getting rid of power and speaker wires will be great and it won’t end there, because wireless USB will replace USB cables as well. There is an agreed Wireless USB standard and maybe we’ll start seeing some products introduced at CES.

I think it will be a major improvement to the computing experience to only have a couple of cables powering the major components. It will be much easier to keep things clean and neat as there’ll be less place for the dust bunnies to hide.

Mind you, with all that radio activity going between your peripherals, power being transmitted, and your cell-phone Bluetoothing your computer, you’ll probably be able warm your pies or defrost your vegetables by placing them behind your computer.

That last statement was a joke, :-), by the way. I’m convinced that going wireless will be perfectly safe but it’s bound to worry some sectors of the population.

You can access daily reports on the CES at ces.cnet.com.

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