eager reader

Tuesday's 'VHS' column resonated with some readers. In our review of 'Super 8', I summoned the ghosts of 'The Goonies' and 'Blow Out'. Both are great films. Until today, I could think of nothing at all that they had in common.

Today's Gizmodo ad for a nasty 3M pico projector brought my review back to my mind. It, too, summons ghosts of cinema past to lorem ipsum up however many words 3M paid for. The first two were 'The Goonies' and 'Blow Out'.

I think the odds of that specific evocation are probably not as long those of Pirate Willie's treasure being real. I do think they are pretty long.

I like cosmic balance. I'll keep it going by reposting my own thoughts on pico projectors  from my September piece 'ewaste: big picture':

> As far as I can tell, most of the recent
> innovation in the projector market
> is in 'pico-projectors'. These take
> some of the very same DLPs used in
> more expensive projectors and pair
> them with 50 lumen LEDs. This seems
> like an attempt to move down-market
> without first having a market. These
> projectors still cost hundreds of
> dollars and typically can't produce an image
> larger than a cheap laptop in a room
> with any ambient light.

I stand corrected. Gizmodo's  3M projector is (up to) 60 lumens, not the 50 I so disparaged. $299 from Amazon. They do make a big deal out of the DLP.

Unfortunately, the 3M is actually kind of interesting. They market it as a 'streaming projector' but the stream is courtesy a Roku stick that sits in a pocket in the back. I think the stick is the Roku 3400R Streaming Stick ($99 from Amazon). The projector contains its own battery and powers the stick. 

That's almost interesting. These new sticks look a bit like beefy USB thumb drives or 3g modems but they are actually a new thing -- HDMI sticks. They hang off a male HDMI plug, draw power from an attached display, consume content over wifi and excrete video. This is as close a device as has yet been constructed to Douglas Adams' 'Babel Fish'. I don't care to consider the theological implications.

Here's the actual interesting bit. Roku's not the only fish in the HDMI stick waste lagoon. There is probably an entire Chinese factory that does nothing but make new factories to build Android HDMI sticks like this. $55! Yow! 3M actually built a cheap, projecting life support system for Android sticks and they just haven't figured it out yet.

3M? Are you (or your Gizmodo lackeys) reading? I'll take two and I'll call you in the morning. Contact me in the comments below and I'll stuff some Android in there and give you a spiffy review. Just don't expect me to claim a viewing distance of up to 120 inches.

Once you guys finish that, build your (up to) 60 lumen projector into a recessed retrofit ceiling fixture (like this) with a short-throw lens and I'll buy several to use as digital wall washes. That would show those sissies over at Philips just where they could stuff their ZigBee lightbulb.

Sorry for the insane consumer electronic product planning spasm. Bunnie is busy hacking DNA and someone has to pick up the slack.

prewaste

Ewaste is not a destination. It is a process. The process is most visible for me during staging, the phase where the broken and the useless take up enough valuable space that a trip to a recycler is in order.

Woot helped me bring some new ewaste into the house recently. They ran a special on Audyssey Lower East Side Media Speakers. I bit. I forgot that good things do not need special sale prices. These speakers now inhabit an ewaste phase that I don't really have nailed down in my evolving taxonomy. I own them. They don't do what I wanted them to do. I am now condemned to have them wander the house in absurd alternate use cases until they ultimately betray me by confusing or electrocuting some other family member.

I have been using Apple's AirPlay for home audio since the feature turned up in their original Airport Express base stations. I have several small zones and I don't ask much of my speakers. I have tried several times to find a decent pair of powered speakers that can be configured once, set high on top of a  bookshelf or cabinet together with the Express, and forgotten.

I think Apple missed a decent bet by not supporting USB speakers on the Express. They have always included a full size powered USB port that supports a narrow range of printers and one esoteric, obsolete USB remote control dongle Keyspan.

I tried for years to just use the Express as a USB power supply for cheap USB speakers that supported an aux. input. I then just patched the analog output of the Express into the aux. input of the speakers. This always worked for a while. The Express power supplies were never up to the task, though, and
several died after a few months of this treatment. Irritatingly, the first one lived long enough for me to taste success and hook speakers up to all the rest. They all died before I figured the speakers as culprits.

I want USB speakers because I want a single-outlet solution. I have several sets of the discontinued Logitech Z-5 and I'm quite happy with them though I can no longer find them new. I want the Express over other third-party AirPlay boxes because I know that I can put them out of reach and not worry about them for years at a time.

I eventually solved the power problem and kept a single socket with the PlugBug from Twelve South. The PlugBug sits against an Apple powerbrick-shaped object and interposes between the wall and the hidden female power receptacle inside an Apple brick. It effectively adds a USB charge port to your brick. The original Express units used the same replaceable power tip that Apple has supplied with laptop bricks for more than a decade. Apple's new Express units use a new design that eliminates the removable tip and makes the PlugBug unsuitable.

The Audyssey speakers seemed appealing. They are not too big, not too ugly, not too expensive (at Woot's price), and they include an optical SPDIF port that shoud accept digital tunes directly from the Express. They are also available. That's a big advantage over the Z-5.

The Audyssey speakers are not USB powered. I give up. The PlugBug is really no different than an outlet splitter anyway. The speakers have a volume knob that the Z-5s lack. I usually place speakers out of reach or out of sight and the volume knob doesn't get much use. I actually added inline attenuators (headphone volume controls) to the Z-5s so that I could statically balance my zones. The Audyssey knob could eliminate that hassle and small expense. In any case, the attenuator wouldn't work with SPDIF.

The crippling flaw is that Audyssey put a small microswitch behind the volume knob. You have to punch that switch to hear sound. The speakers turn themselves off half an hour after they decide the music is over. You have to punch the button again to hear music. There is no auto on. There is no remote. These speakers are useless as hidden AirPort speakers.

Audyssey does not acknowledge this as a product planning failure. They may actually think it was a good idea. With one cheap microswitch they were able to segment their product family into a cheap media speaker line for computer dorks who put up with flaws like this all the time and a more expensive line for proper AV types. They may have even missed a trick. They could have left the auto-off in their more expensive products and added an even more expensive Crestron add-in that could automatically poke the button and rotate the knob for you.

I surfed review sites and forums briefly in search of relief. It was typical forum fare. I was either right but out of luck, or I was wrong and symptomatic of obese Americans because I would not get up to press a button, or wrong and symptomatic of coal-burning Americans because I hate energy saving modes, or wrong because I was trying to do whole house audio without fully funding some audio peddler's new spinnaker.

Perhaps Google will place an Audyssey ad next to this post and pay me a dollar if you click it. If I get ten ad clicks from this post, I'll take the speakers apart and defeat this auto-off or kill them trying. I'll post the result here.

VHS

I have never had much luck with VCR repair. If you are stuck with a dead Betamax deck then I can't do anything for you but send you over to the Lancia forums. They have been keeping betas alive despite the odds for decades. Mostly coupes though. If you have a dead VHS that you wanted to revive for the sole purpose of screening 'The Goonies' then I may have a suggestion. Get Netflix for a month. Watch 'Super8'. Steven Spielberg, executive producer to both, probably gets paid more through Netflix than through your unheralded cassette march. Be kind to the man. Don't rewind.

I have small children. I don't get out much. I only saw 'Super8' two days ago. Worse, I didn't immediately recognize the 1979-era scene as vintage. J. J. Abrams may have been content to merely direct franchise reboots back in the (most recent) Star Trek era. He has since rebooted himself as a producer of that signature line of modern cinema. Sinofsky may now be deep into a stealth-mode startup. He should be comforted in his dotage by the now positive connotations of  'reboot'.

A reboot in a tricky thing. The 'omnishambles' (total sop to my UK readers) Star Trek approach to this is to alter the timeline and advance a new story. Pirate Willie was above all that and his Goonie followers are as well. Better to just rename the whole thing and backdate it by six years as well. In the present political climate, pirates are probably best described as (illegal) aliens anyway. Storyline transformation complete!

Actually, there is 5% more storyline unique to the modern retelling. The entire gimmick of Goonies The Younger is that our intrepid kids capture something on film they were never supposed to see. I must admit that I'm a sucker for that gimmick. I loved it in 'Blow Out'. It works less well when the footage is of an alien that is about to make his destructive presence known to the entire town, film or no film.

'Super8' sets the '79 vibe not just with a headstone for the slower viewers but also with subtle AM radio references to TMI. Apple plays along in their subtle way by autocorrecting 'or no' above into ORNL. Awesome.

Ditch the deck. Have one last Goonies weekend. Screen 'Super8'. It even has a fat kid.

UPDATE: I didn't mean to so completely reboot Mike Ryan's interview-style shtick so completely so soon. The entire extended Ryan clan has had a tough week. First Paul with last Tuesday's election, then Jack and his beloved CIA with the recent Petraeus flap. Now Mike with my failure to adequately google before blogging.

montessori

I just watched 'True Grit', the promotional video put together by the Western States Montessori Conference. Though set in the late 19th century, somewhat before Dr. Maria Montessori's elevation to Saint, the role of an early Montessori education in the development of protagonist Mattie Ross is clear.

I highly recommend this film if you are on the fence about a Montessori education for your child. As the WSMC explains in their literature, fence sitting and fences generally remain divisive topics in the American West.

proposal

I'm neither journalist nor lawyer nor public policy scholar but I do have a prime lens on my camera and I drink a prosumer gin. So that's something.

I'm a gadget blogger. I have never used marijuana and I don't hold any patents. Now that I have established my bona fides, let me say that our present intellectual property dysfunction has been on my mind for some time. I think I have figured out a way that our system could actually do someone some good and invite reform simultaneously.

Marijuana initiatives will be appearing down ballot on a lot of rickety folding tables in just over two weeks' time. The Commerce Clause (Santa's evil alter ego) and Preemption make these present initiatives irrelevant. The next ones need not be and the answer might be patents and exhaustion doctrine.

No state can avoid the federal Controlled Substances Act that appears to preempt any effort to legalize marijuana. Neither California nor South Dakota could alter their state markets for existing cultivars without an almost immediate effect on interstate markets far beyond these new, local markets. If Maine or Oklahoma had the power to project their laws beyond their borders, they might be able to define the interstate market as null and limit the applicability of the CSA.

Here's my quick and easy path to marijuana legalization and the Supreme Court:

0. License the Monsanto Roundup-Ready patents.

1. Genetically engineer a visually distinctive, Roundup-Ready strain of marijuana.

2. Patent the strain.

3. Assign the patent to the state.

4. The state makes a limited patent license grant to growers, distributors, and buyers in exchange for royalty payments. The terms of this license prohibit use or possession outside the state and impose every manner of post-sale limitation available. The state has every tool necessary to eliminate any effect on the inter-state market.

5. The state and Monsanto vigorously enforce their respective patent rights.

6. The state and Monsanto profit!

One of the apparent weaknesses of this plan is its dependence on post-sale limitations but we live in exciting times. The Supreme Court announced earlier this month that they would hear the appeal of Bowman v. Monsanto (thanks kanebiolaw). If the Court finds that a sale of a self-propagating entity need not exhaust patent rights, then a state could be off to the races.

Monsanto, you know where to send the check. I'm still at the same address.

States, remember to thank ERCOT and its predecessor organizations for artfully dodging the Commerce Clause since 1935.

Feds, go do patent reform or you'll wind up on the wrong side of this absurd marijuana legalization scheme. The core dispute in Bowman v. Monsanto is not rooted in biology. It's rooted in self-reproducibility. The very idea that software patents not subject to exhaustion could become the law of the land is completely insane. Our current copyright and patent system shows that policymakers have been smoking something for a long time.

update now

I travelled last week to give a talk about the role of Vaudeville in consumer electronic keynote adresses in the early twenty-first century. I normally take a straight man with me for these addresses, both for the classic comic role and to flip powerpoint lantern slides for me.

I travelled light this time and used Keynote on my iPad to deliver slides. I connected a third-generation AppleTV to the conference room projector and used AirPlay mirroring to beam the slides from iPad to projector.

This approach actually worked and I learned a few things in the doing. The first thing I learned came a week or so before I arrived. My hosts at the Center for Neo-Victorian Studies have projection equipment that sits at the leading edge of 1987 interconnect technology. Their VGA cables are thinner than a human wrist but somehow deliver resolutions that rival the pricey IBM 8514.

My AppleTV sadly does not support this visual beast. The second- and third-generation boxes drive only wimpy HDMI digital signals. My third-generation box drives 1080p. I solved this problem with a brilliant little box from Kanex that takes HDMI from the AppleTV and converts it to VGA. The box is really no more than a bulky cable. It is powered from the HDMI port. It works. Slides from Keynote wound up sidebar-ed and letterboxed. I started to fight it and instead found a zoom button on the projector remote that got me close enough to an answer. I suspect that a better answer exists. As far as I can tell, my scenario is the intended use case for the Kanex adapter.

The AppleTV is about the size of six walnuts
(pictured with Betty O'Shannon for scale)
Photo courtesy your correspondent

I got the signal from iPad to AppleTV by using the Personal Hotspot feature on my LTE iPad. I pre-associated the AppleTV with the iPad's SSID before I left home. I didn't want to put any of my devices on my host's network and my personal experience with AirPlay or any other mDNS technology on public networks is spotty at best.

I found the iPad much more comfortable than many dedicated (and much lighter) presentation remotes. I appreciated the simultaneous display of speaker notes, though it's just not my mode to look at them.

Every presentation remote I have ever used has ultimately led to Presenter Induced Oscillation -- a phenomenon related to Pilot Induced Oscillation -- where a remote or key click is somehow missed by the presentation machine and the presenter spends five or six clicks back and forth to regain control of the talk. Many pilots have successfully ejected from uncontrollable PIO situations. Many have not. Presenters rarely choose to bail out. Most just ride that talk down into the ground.

The iPad was perfectly controllable. My talk was not embarrassment free. I got everything booted and associated. I got an image on the projector. It was not the image of my first slide. It was a dialog box from the AppleTV telling me that a software update was available. It asked if I wanted to update now or update later. It did not go away. I realized too late that I had left the Apple IR remote in my hotel  room. Fortunately, someone among my hosts had an Apple IR remote and the episode cost me only five uncool minutes.

Apple has prided themselves for years on the visual unobtrusiveness of their products. My Apple monitors have an LED to indicate that the monitor is OFF, not ON, so that I'll never catch a stray eyefull of distracting indicator while working. Do the consumption classes not deserve the attention lavished on the creatives? My Airport base stations subtly change their indicator color to indicate new firmware versions. My iPhone puts a little badge on the settings icon to do the same. Why a faceful of unavoidable dialog from this little box?

I consider the experiment a success but I do not recommend it. Even if your software is up to date and you have your remote stuffed in your pocket, the best case for the Apple TV AirPlay streamer is that it will blast your audience with movie posters for whatever adolescent flicks are at the top of the iTunes payola chart for a few moments before your slides come up. I think it looks about as professional as pulling foils from a My Little Pony Trapper Keeper.

deep funk

The memory of beating an Apple wireless keyboard to death (see ewaste) was still in my mind two weeks ago as I worked on an epic ewaste manifesto dedicated to my outgoing Novatel MiFi 2200. That memory was somehow on the mind of my replacement Apple wireless keyboard as well. Bluetooth promised gadgets that could talk to each other. Apparently they do. Word spreads.

After weeks of good behavior from my bluetooth gadgets, my replacement keyboard decided to avenge its cousin. It switched itself on inside my laptop bag and, together with a co-conspiring Incase Origami Workstation, pinned its backspace key down.

The entire post disappeared. I spun into a deep funk that is only now ending.

The Origami is otherwise quite neat. The Apple keyboard snaps inside securely. The case switches easily from keyboard cover to iPad stand. Amazon reviewers complain that the little Velcro patches are glued poorly to the plastic case. This is also my experience. The patches secure the Origami in either mode. I have glued them back on twice.

This post (may it last long enough to be read) was composed on the iPad using the on-screen keyboard. The best keyboard is the one you have with you.