PK Shiu
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Review

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Nike Free Defective

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DSC_9057 I thought I found the perfect atheletic shoes -- for walking, running, and more importantly, for doing wushu and tai chi. The Nike Free. When it first came out, I brought a pair online from Finish Line. It was great. I was happy. Until about a month and half later...

The mesh material started tearing from the heel, on both shoes. Since it happened at about the same time, and on both feet, I am pretty sure that it is not damaged by me hitting something. (Especially not on the heel)! Examining the tear, it is obvious that the glued attachment at that point is not very strong.

I emailed customer service, and they told me that if I think it's a manufacturer defect, I can bring it back to the physical store and exchange them within 90 days. I took them back to the store, and they were nice about it -- exchanging them for a new pair. However --

They said the reason for the tear is that I must have stepped on the heel to take the shoes off, which I do sometimes. They said Nike actually will not take the shoes back from the store because they do not believe that is normal wear and tear. The store must have gotten a lot of return/exchange requests, they said now they tell the customers not to step on the heel to remove the shoes when they buy them.

What do you think? The shoes are great. You can even use the Nike iD system to customize a pair for yourself. But for $105 a pair, would you think you need to remember to not step on the heel when removing the shoes?

Zojirushi Hot Water Dispensing Pot Review

This is a review of the Japanese Zojirushi hot water dispensing pot, CD-LCC30. Or the Micom 3.0 Liter Electric Dispensing Pot, as it is called. I bought it from Amazon when they were having a sale. There are three different models with different sizes, the 3.0 Liter is the smaller one. For what I need that is enough.

My parents have a lower tech version of this for a long time. It is very useful if you want to have hot water for tea or cooking. I drink lots of tea, and sometimes coffee. I am the lazy type where I microwave cup(s) of hot water. Seems like a waste of energy, and it takes time. This hot water pot works well as a high tech solution.

The basic operation is that the pot will boil water and then keep it at one of three temperatures, 208, 195 or 175 degrees F. There is an electric pump that dispenses the hot water. There are two different buttons for the pump, you have to press UNLOCK, then press the DISPENSE button to pump the water. The unit will auto lock after 10 seconds of unused. A good safety feature.

There are a few very neat design things that is not obvious if you look at the product description:

  • The entire unit swivel. It has a built in turntable base. This make dispensing and counter placement easier.
  • The lid can be pop open, or removed completely. It makes cleaning much easier.
  • The electric (AC) cord has a magnet built in, so it can be connected and disconnected easily. The contacts are mechanical, but the magnet helps hold the plug in place.
  • The outside water level indicator is very clever -- it is a round tube with blue diagonal strips as background. Therefore if there is water in the tube, the strips are magnified. It is very easy to see where is the water level.

Conclusion -- highly recommended.

How to redirect old URL to Movable Type 3.x new archive filenames

Movable type 2.x used to, by default, use numeric file names for individual entry archive files. There is a plug in that change that behaviour to use a text file name created from the title of the entry. With Movabletype 3.x, the new style naming is the default.

But what if your old site and file names are referenced and indexed by all the search engines? What if your site is so popular that there are a lot of external links pointing to the old file names? Even if you keep the old files around, they will not be updated if you ever update the entries after switching to the new and better naming system.

I have a solution for you. The following "template" will generate a list of redirect command for the Apache web server to tell any visitors going to the old file names to move to the new ones. This should speed up search engine indexing, and make sure that they are all pointing to the new files.

<MTArchiveList><MTEntries>
redirect permanent /loft/archives/<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>.html <$MTEntryPermalink$>
</MTEntries></MTArchiveList>

Change the directory name "/loft/archives" to wherever is your archive directory and put this into an index template, rebuild it once, and put the output into your Apache configuration file. If you do not have full access to your main config file, you can also put it in your .htaccess file, but it will be a little slower.

Have fun !

Building a Home Theatre PC

I spent my Christmas / year end time on a home theatre PC project. I have wanted to do this for a long time. I have RCN Digital Cable right now, and it does not work with Tivo very well. What I want my HTPC to do mainly are:

  • Record TV (like Tivo), quality not too important
  • Play my huge CD collection in high quality
  • Display my photos

I re-purposed a holder Shuttle PC that I have. It is a small form factor (SFF) PC, model SS51G Version 1. It has a reasonably fast P4 2.4 GZ processor and lots of memory. But it was using all the board services -- video and sound. This motherboard's SIS 651 family of video is notoriously bad. The shuttle has two slots (it is, afterall, a small form factor PC sized of two shoeboxes). I bought a ATI 9600 XT video card, and a Hauppauge PVR-250 TV Capture card to complete the HTPC.

Hardware Installation

The hardware installation is not too difficult. The inside of the Shuttle tight, but the AGP and the PCI card slots are right on the side. The only trick that I found is that on the back panel, there is a piece of metal that flips up to make room for the end of the card during insertion. If you have a Shuttle, take a look and you'll see what I mean. That is a very cool and useful design. I installed the ATI video card first to make sure that works. Then I installed the Win-TV/PVR card.

ATI Configuration

To me, this is the scary part of the installation. I followed the instructions on the ATI documentation. First, I installed the latest AGP driver for the Shuttle from their support website. Make sure I got the version 1 motherboard support page. Then I have uninstalled the current video driver, and then disable the on-board video from the BIOS. I wonder what will happen if the ATI does not work and the on-board video is disabled? Without video, how do I re-enable the on-board video?

After the ATI card is working, I installed their driver and software and everything is working on the video side.

Win TV PVR-250 Installation

I though this would be an easy installed. I installed the card, and then installed the drivers from the included CD-Rom. The instruction said I should then install the applications (WinTV2000 etc, which I need). However the CD-ROM does not contain any of the software!

I went to their support website and downloaded all the new drivers and application. You have to follow their instructions to get everything installed correctly.

 

Movabletype 3.1

I finally decided to start moving from the old 2.6x Movabletype to the new 3.1x version. I tried it on an internal blog first. I has one problem after the upgrade : The upgrade somehow overwrote my template files -- I link the templates to a text file on disk so that I can edit them quicker. Stupid me -- I forgot to back those up. Somehow during the upgrade process (from 2.51) overwrote the template files. I still do not understand how that happened.

I really wanted to switch to the new archive file naming convention -- naming the file with the subject text instead of numbers. That is very useful because I can then look at my website access log and can tell immediately what are the popular pages without having to decode the numeric file name. I switched off the "use old archive style" option and rebuilt my site. It created all the new archive pages, and did not delete the old numeric pages. I think that is a good thing. So any external links to the old style page will still work, and hopefully slowly those links get updated.

I then updated this blog to 3.1 also. It went a little smoother, now that I know what to do. I also backed up all my templates before hand. This time my templates were not corrupted. I still did not know what happened.

Vonage Finally and a brief review

I am finally fully converted over to Vonage for my home phone service. Called RCN and they have successfully (two days later) removed my phone service. As a result I also downgraded my bundled service from RCN. Now I have the "power CI" package, cable plus internet. It costs $114 with tax !! Rediculous. I saved $47 from removing the phone service, and my basic Vonage service is costing me $17 with tax, so after all this work I saved $30. They offered me two different bundled. The CI package includes digital cable, which include G4TechTV and BBCA, Sundance and Indepence channel. The "Essential" package has everything up to channel 97, and it does not include the cable box. And in theory the "essential" package only have 5 megabyte download speed on the data side. There is a $20 difference between the packages. But if you add in the cable box, the difference is hardly worth it. And that's how they make money !! I can't wait to switch back to DSS.

Is it worth it to move to Vonage ? Of course ! Vonage also have more features. I now have my home phone set to forward on no-answer to my cellphone. I also get realtime activity report, and very cheap international long distance if I need to use it. Again, some hightlight of Vonage features are:

  • Call forwarding -- you can tell Vonage to forward any calls to your Vonage number to another number after some number of rings. For example, if I am not home, Vonage will eventually ring my cellphone.
  • Simultaneous ring -- This is a very cool feature that is also on my business Linx system -- When someone calls, you can have Vonage right both the phone at home and a second number at the same time. So you can give out one number, and answer either at home or with your cellphone. This is one good way to hide your cellphone number, for example.
  • Web voice mail -- any voice mail stored by the system is stored as wav files. You can listen/download them from their web interface, or
  • have Vonage email the voice mail as an attachment, to your own email account

For more information, read my long review here.

Two more Firefox Extensions

I have been adding to my Firefox browser more and more extensions. Today, since it is Thanksgiving, a slow day, I looked around and added two more extensions:

  1. The weatherfox/forecastfox extension places three small icons on the browser toolbar to show current, today, and tomorrow's weather. You can customize it to show more days, and more locations. it pulls the weather from weather.com.
  2. The Web developer extension let you examine a HTML page, look at the forms, CSS, tables, and about one thousand other things. A must have if you are developing web application and need help (who doesn't) to debug your generated HTML forms and laouts.

RCN Hell...

You know it is not easy. I just finished my LNP transfer, i.e. transfer my local voice / land telephone line from RCN to Vonage. My bill should drop fro mabout $40 to $15, plus Vonage has all sort of cool service with that line. RCN messed up (lost the paperwork) the transfer request for months. On Tuesday the transfer was finally completed. I called today (Wed) to change my RCN service. I currently have a bundled service, digital cable, data, and voice. After going thru their phone menu and got to a customer service, she told me it is a different department (billing/multiple-services) that handles voice disconnect. More waiting on the line, and finally I got to the right person. She then told me that the transfer is not completed in their system. I told her that my number is changed. But she said it will take another day to "complete the disconnect in their system" and to call back tomorrow. To be continued tomorrow...

Firefox Extension Bookmarks Synchronizer

I am trying out the bookmark synchronizer extension for firefox. The idea sounds great, but there are no documentation. This is how I got it to work:

  1. I setup a WebDAV folder on my server (more secure than clear text FTP
  2. in the extension option, I selected "HTTP" as the protocol, and enter my host name, user name, etc in the dialog box.
  3. I downloaded the XSL and CSS from the author's site and place those two files, xbel.xsl and xbel.css into the same directory on the webDAV directory. To download those file, click here for the CSS and here for the XSL

  4. I also use the advanced tab and added to the style tags box the following: <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="xbel.xsl"?>.

Also see all of the extensions that I used here.

Vonage Update, Portable phone number, NOT

I signed up for Vonage VoIP service back in August this year. I do not use my home land line for anything except to answer the door bell. Why should I pay over $40 a month to RCN for that privilege? I wanted to keep my existing phone number (from RCN) because I do not want to go thru another phone number changing exercises with all my vendors. Almost three months later, and my number still have not been switched from RCN. I emailed Vonage support and after two days they notified me that

... I researched your account and determined that your number transfer was not successfully executed. Vonage researched your order and determined that your request was sent to the carrier however your paper work was not processed. Vonage has already expedited your request with your local carrier and we are now waiting for a transfer date to be issued. When we do receive this information we will contact you immediately via E-mail. Who fault is that? Vonage or RCN? Keep waiting while I pay two phone bills...

Firefox

I finally is switching over to Firefox as my main browser. I find that it works better then Opera on some pages. It is also highly customizable. With some customization, I get the best of Opera plus the compatibility of Firefox. For examples:

  • I can finally open up a new tab (I prefer tab browsing) and have the home page loaded automatically. My homepage is my bookmark page. So that makes it easy to go places.
  • I now have the easy option of openning up a new window or a new tab.
  • I can use the middle button to open a link in a new tab.

Don't forget to installs some extensions to get all the extra features. Currently I am using:

  • ForecastFox -- international weather
  • status bar Clock -- show date/time in browser, so that I don't have to drop my mouse down to the auto-hidden windows start bar to see the clock, and mouse over to see the date. Note: There seems to be a problem with the installation source where the file is incorrectly marked for version 0.10 instead of 1.0+. You can work around it by changing the app version or find a repackaged version on the net.
  • session saver
  • Add bookmark here - Now I get one of the nicest UI feature of Opera working in Firefox -- This feature let you navigate, using the bookmark drop down menu, to the place where you want to add the bookmark, and a "add bookmark here" selection is available right there. This is much more intuitive. Try it. You'll see what I mean.
  • The Web developer extension let you examine a HTML page, look at the forms, CSS, tables, and about one thousand other things. A must have if you are developing web application and need help (who doesn't) to debug your generated HTML forms and laouts.
  • Bookmark Synchronizer to share bookmark between installation. See my short documentation on how to set it up.

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  • MeasureIt let you measure pixels on screen, useful (at least for me) in spacing and designing layout.
  • Tabbrowser preferences, updated to work with firefox 1.0.

Nowever, there is a known problem with interaction between Eudora and Firefox. If you have Firefox as the default browser, clicking a link in Eudora will open up two windows in Firefox. There is a known fix, which involve deleting some registry entries. Read about it here

BTW, this Gripes about Firefox page has lots of useful information.

ATT Clueless Wireless

I do not use ATT Wireless. I use t-mobile. I like t-mobile. Today I had to call ATT Wireless for someone to update the service. First they have to transfer me to the GSM department, then their computer system is down, then they cannot explain to me the pricing for the MMS service. It took them three tries to get the pricing. Then I asked about m-mode. They cannot explain the relationship between MMS and m-mode. Does m-mode include MMS? How knows. I gave up.

Winamp via the Web

Want to control your winamp via a web browser? Install the WAWI plug-in. It works with the new Winamp 5 as well. I have been looking for something like this for a while. There is the httpQ plug-in which let you talk to winamp via http. But you still need to write some code. The WAWI plug-in let you access and control winamp immediately. It also has a directory browsing feature. So you can add songs from your library of MP3's to the playlist. I actually have this working using the wifi NetFront browser on my Sony TH55 PDA. I can wirelessly control my music server connected to my stereo at home.