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When we moved to Seattle one of the purchases we needed to make was a new TV. I happen to love buying new TVs because it’s not something I do often, and the technology changes that occur in that time span are staggering.

The first TV I purchased was a 27 inch tube Sony. I then got a 34 inch 16:9 Toshiba CRT that was about 200 lbs but the first HD set I owned. It was stunning watching “progressive scan” DVDs.

The next TV was a Samsung Plasma and since then I’ve decided all my future TVs would be Samsung. This was for 2 reasons. 1) Their service is amazing and 2) they make great, well priced, quality products that are pc/media center friendly. Since my TV is mostly driven by a Media Center TV, things like DVI/HDMI support are important.

So on moving to Seattle I decided on getting a Samsung LED TV. These TVs are 1.2 inches thick. I can’t describe how cool this is. They also look awesome and come in giant sizes (55 inches) an weigh practically nothing. In fact, Samsung makes a wall mount that is more similar to hanging a heavy picture to a wall than a TV.

Figuring out where to buy this TV from was a challenge. Good old Brick and Mortar wanted about $400 more than online, but I was also pretty sketched out about buying such a big ticket and heavy item from an online etailer. Also most of the good prices were from “grey market” dealers.

Luckily Microsoft had a special going with a company called Intech out in New York that was an authorized Samsung dealer. The prices were better than any online deal I saw and they included a free media center extender. Shipping was also free.

I pulled the trigger and ordered the TV. it arrived in 5 days from the east coast. I set the TV and all seemed well, but then I noticed that the TV was actually bent! yes, the TV is so thin that at some point the TV had received concealed damage in the box and had a nice big dent in the top middle. I never noticed because you could only see this by looking at the profile, and the picture was otherwise perfect.

I pretty much assumed I was out of luck, but working with the fine folks at Intech they worked tirelessly over the course of the next week to work with Samsung to issue a replacement TV. This required that I document the damage by sending them a bunch of photos to document the damage, and they were fantastic in working with me through this. I shudder to think what might have happened had I purchased from a great market etailer.

Anyway, I’m writing this because I love to point out when companies go above and beyond to make things right. Thanks Intech and Samsung!

You can view Intech’s webiste here: http://www.thehighdefinitionstore.com/

I’m a pretty big fan of convergence when it’s done well. Having fewer gadgets, cables, and power supplies to carry around is all good. This is especially true since we had our daughter and are looking to shed stuff that gets cumbersome to carry, pack and deal with.

The iPhone has turned out to be a pretty decent convergence device. Specifically it combined a smartphone with a music / video / podcast player that was just as good as a stand alone iPod. This was a huge selling point for me.

However, the original iPhone 3G had a pretty lousy camera and so it was never in the running to really replace a real camera. Furthermore the maps program while cool, was no replacement when you needed voice and turn by turn navigation. So for that I had a Garmin nuvi device that I used faithfully for the past 2 years. Otherwise the iPhone is an excellent “I am here, tell me what is near me device”.

Since getting the iPhone 3GS I’m frankly surprised at how many photos and videos I take with the thing (including close ups now that it can do Macro). The iPhone is actually “good enough” for many scenarios that my camera was previously required. For one thing, I carry my iPhone everywhere with me, so the likelihood that I will have it when I want to capture a video is extremely high… like when we were driving around in our car and our 2 year old said she wanted to listen to Lady Gaga and Madonna. Pretty funny, and no camera with us at the time, but we got it on video and were able to upload it to Facebook directly from the iPhone.

Now, with TomTom for the iPhone, another piece of technology that I would schlep around on vacations and around Seattle when I’m trying to navigate to Home Depot or Best Buy is no longer necessary.

So now we have a device that can do:

• Phone
• Email and Calendar
• Photos
• Video capture
• Music
• Turn by Turn navigation
• Games
• etc

And you get the point. This thing can replace at least 3 or 4 independent device and do the same job 80% as good as dedicated gadget.

I call that progress.

If you car has an integrated iPod kit, chances are when Apple removed the ability for Firewire to charge through the iPod adapter, your iPhone 3G and iPod don’t charge any longer.

In the past few months a few options have emerged that basically allow a firewire powered iPod connector to charge the iPhone or iPod using USB.

I had luck with an adapter that Apple sells called Scosche passPORT. It works great in one of my cars that has an aftermarket Blitzsafe adapter, but it doesn’t work at all in my new car, a Mercedes with a Media Interface (which is basically a killer interface that allows control of the iPod or iPhone via the system’s COMMAND interface, steering wheel etc).

Anyhow, even though automakers have had about 3 years to adapt to this change, the bottom line is that many of them have yet to release anything that allows their kits to charge a modern iPhone or iPod. Silly really.

So these adapters are great. Griffin makes one now called the Griffin Charge Converter however it states very clearly on their web site:

Our Charge Converter is not compatible with Pioneer head units that use the CD-iB100 or CD-i200 iPod to IP-Bus adapter. The Pioneer units send proprietary data as well as FireWire power. Although the cable will continue to pass the audio, iPods that charge via USB-only will not charge, remote commands may be limited, and the head unit may display an error message. iPods that charge via USB-only include the 4th generation iPod nano and 2nd generation iPod touch, as well as iPhone 3G.

This may also apply to the Mercedes Media Interface Cable.

Bummer. Mercedes released a service bulletin S-B-82.60/643a in January that says:

If you receive customer reports in the above model vehicles (equipped with any of the two options below) that their Apple product (refer to below list) is not charging but music/telephone communication functions are operational, this maybe due to a change in the charging circuit design by the Apple Corporation.

Apple Product:  iPhone 3G, iPod Nano 4th Generation, iPod Touch 2nd Generation and iPod Classic  120 Gigabyte (GB) storage capacity, as well as all iPod/iPhone products superseding the ones  referenced in this Bulletin.

For vehicles equipped with the Accessory Media Interface Option, a customer-pay remedy is forthcoming. This bulletin will be updated accordingly when available.

For iPod Interface Kits (part numbers listed on Page 1), a new iPod data cable connecting the iPod Interface Module and the iPod/iPhone, the part number is B6 782 45 31. 

This is a customer-pay remedy.

This technical change (change in charging circuit in newer Apple Products) is applied by the Apple Corporation; MBUSA is not responsible for diagnostics, parts and labor costs.

So basically what they are doing is blaming Apple for this when they had a few years to address the problem while also saying they have no solution for 2009 cars with their brand new Media Interface.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I found an adapter that does work made by a nice fellow in Sweden. I PayPal’ed him last week and received my adapter today. The best part is, IT WORKS.

You can get the Small iPhone 3G Charge Converter for $29.90 plus $9 shipping.

Note: Mercedes has fixed this problem with a new cable for the iPhone. Part number is A 001 827 84 04 and the cost is about $70.

Wow, this is exciting news. No longer to you have to carry around a security dongle or pay money to get one. VeriSign created an application for the iPhone that does everything that one of their devices does and that I blogged about a few months ago.

Now you really have no excuse… if you have a PayPal or eBay account and an iPhone protect it from hackers with two factor authentication.

If you use VeriSign’s OpenID system, PIP… then this is a natural way to log into that service.

My hope is that more and more services will support two factor authentication via cell phones. VeriSign clearly has a leg up here, but I suspect RSA won’t be far behind in getting an RSA SecurID app out there.

Big Kudos to the VeriSign folks.

There is one thing in life that is certain. Hard drivers get cheaper and bigger.

For the past year I’ve been using a Windows Home Server to backup 6 computers in my life. If there is one piece of technology you should down it’s a Home Server. It has literally probably saved my wife from devastation at least once (she completely horked some work critical data that would have cost her months of time) and it’s saved me countless hours when upgrading hard drives and such in my Media Center. Best of all, it’s piece of mind and I value that a lot.

BTW, they key about Windows Home Server is that you don’t have to think about what to backup and what not to backup. Traditional backup solutions have you deciding what to save and what not to save. Windows Home Server just backs every dammed file up (minus temp files and such). You don’t bother to think about it, the entire computer is backed up such that if you rip the hard drive out and place a new one in, you can restore your computer to any machine state over the past 3 months). Is that cool or what? Not to mention it uses Single Instance store meaning that if a file exists on two machines it only stores one copy of it. That means that when you backup 6 machines running the same operating system, the os is only stored once on the server, not 6 times.

However, Home Server not a panacea. If your house burns down, or some one steals your Home Server, all your stuff goes with it. As such you need some kind of a backup for your backup strategy.

Well there are two ways to do this:

1. Remote backup to the cloud
2. Offsite backup

Remote backup to the cloud

Remote backup to the cloud is possible via KeepVault and Jungle Disk, both of which have Home Server add-ins that will copy your stuff to the cloud. The problem with both these services is that they are pretty inefficient. They don’t support block level backups (well Jungle Disk does via a $1 monthly addon). They also don’t support file renames or moves (if you move or rename a file it’s copied back to the server, and in the case of KeepVault they don’t even delete the old copy).

Why should you care about block level backups? Well lets say you have a photo that’s 6 MB. Now lets rate it or add a keyword. Well, now the file has changed by a tiny amount, yet it takes smart backup software to know this. Most software will just see that the file has changed and copy 6 MB up to the cloud.

This isn’t a big deal if we are talking about a single file. But we are talking about gigabytes of data (which I have), then this can seriously mess things up. It means that your bandwidth is getting hogged up by these apps, and the amount of time it takes to copy the changes to the cloud means that your changes are unprotected during this process. No good.

There are two other backup programs I have used that support block level backups, Mozy and Carbonite.

Unfortunately, neither of these are supported on Windows Home Server.

I currently use Carbonite after having started with it and then switching to Mozy for about a year. However, Mozy royally screwed up my backup at one point and my attempts to get them to help went unanswered so I dropped them and went back to Carbonite. Since then I’ve not had a problem. It just works and I don’t think about it (like my Home Server).

As I mentioned though, they don’t support Home Server. For me this isn’t a big deal though. I have a Windows Media Center PC which acts as a “Media Hub” with all my photos and videos. It also has Windows Live Sync (aka FolderShare) installed and all the stuff I use to Sync between my PCs gets backed up to the Media Center.

This ensures that:

1. all my files are backed up to Home Server (because the Home Server backs up the Media Center nightly)
2. all my files are backed up to the Cloud.

However, is this really practical for all your files? Well keep reading.

Offsite backup

I have also employed an Offsite backup strategy to complement my Cloud backup strategy. An offsite backup is actually what it sounds like. You keep your stuff not at your house.

However, today I got a gizmo that literally makes this a turnkey solution for me.

Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 has a feature that lets you backup your Home Server shares using the built in software. All you do is plug in a USB drive and select which shares you want backed up.

Up until today I was using a desktop USB 500 GB drive to do this and I would take it to work. However, this proved to be a bit of a pain in the neck. It meant that I need to lug around cables and a dreaded power brick. I HATE power bricks.

Anyway, this weekend while at Fry’s I noticed that Seagate makes an awesome little portable drive called the FreeAgent Go. It comes with a super cool dock that you can just leave plugged into your Home Server. Then you can get a couple of 500 GB portable drives that plug into the dock. The drives were selling for $109 (limit one per household) so I got one and plan to get another from Amazon.

Now I can keep one drive at home, and one at work. Once a month I will just swap the drives and it will ensure that I at least have an offsite backup of things like my 100 GB of my music and 200 GB of Movies and such so that I don’t have to rely on Cloud Backup for moving around that much data. If I ever lose a drive it’s also much faster to drive to work, grab 500 GB and drive home than it is to download that much data from the cloud.