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Philips Fidelio P9

Philips Fidelio P9 Review

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Music is something people from all over the world can relate to and appreciate. Most people carry around their music by plugging their white earphones into their ears and pressing play on their favorite iDevice. What happens if you want that portable experience, but want to share the music with other people, like those boom boxes from the 80’s people used to carry on their shoulders? Luckily, this is the year of 2013 and technology has advanced to streaming audio over Bluetooth and having great batteries lasting for days.

The first real contact with a modern day boom box for me personally was a couple of years ago when the original Jambox from Jawbone was released. It had superior sound quality for such a small size and for that price. Times change, and Jawbone recently released a new, bigger version of their popular speaker – the Big Jambox.

This time however, other players have entered the market as well, competing for both the smaller form-factor of the original Jambox and for the larger one as well. I was convinced that there had to be something else out there with features matching, or even surpassing, those of the Jambox.

Philips recently released their new premium speaker Fidelio P9 (the link goes to the Swedish site. It is not yet available on the US site, but Google Translate may help), and it looked like the perfect portable speaker featuring natural materials such as leather, metal and wood. A lot of care and consideration has been put into not only getting a great sound, but the timeless design and smart features.

The outside

The speaker is carefully wrapped in a built-in and non-detachable leather cover, which also doubles as a stand. The detachable side of the leather flap has magnets similar to the iPad SmartCover built-in, which are used to securely fasten the cover when used as a stand. When closed, it keeps the cover firmly in place, and as a smart feature, it automatically turns the speaker off after a few seconds, just like when the SmartCover turns the iPad off.

The stand can be used in several different positions, making it easy to tilt the speaker to get the perfect speaker-to-ear angle.

The battery level can be viewed simply by touching the speaker. Four different white diodes briefly light up to indicate the current charge, and fades away after a few seconds.

The ports

The speaker does not use a standard micro-USB port for charging, but instead has an old-fashioned charger. This is usually no problem, since you will get around eight hours of battery life according to the specs, which lets you keep your charger at home, or at least in a bag.

In addition to Bluetooth audio using A2DP, the P9 speaker also includes a standard 3.5mm jack for plugging in devices without Bluetooth. There is no audio cable included in the package though, which really a bit strange for a premium product, considering that one of their main competitor, Jawbone, includes a great flat cable with their speakers.

The leather cover is not the only “smart” feature. There is a standard USB port on one side of the speaker, which lets you charge your iPhone or other USB powered device, taking power from the speaker batteries. This is a fantastic feature, and there have been reports of getting three complete iPhone charges from the speaker.

The inside

If we remove the speaker grille and take a look behind, we find four 2 inch full range woofers, and two 3/4 inch soft dome tweeters. There are in addition two passive elements on the back using Philips wOOx technology for an increased bass response.

These speakers put out 20W RMS, which is enough to fill a normal sized room without any problem.

The sound

The most important property of a speaker when it comes down to it, still has to be the sound quality – and this is where the P9 really excels. The sound is crystal clear even when turned up loud, much thanks to the separate tweeters and wOOx membranes. If you are a fan of loud music, you will not be disappointed.

The problems

The Fidelio P9 is a great product with few shortcomings, but there are however a couple of small annoyances.

From time to time, when you connect to the speaker using Bluetooth, the connection can suddenly drop and reconnect causing a skip in the music. The solution is to disconnect the Bluetooth connection from my iPad and reconnect the speaker. For some reason, it will work fine at least until the next time the speaker is connected to a device.

Another small issue has to do with the leather cover. It is fastened with screws on the speaker, but the cover is not perfectly aligned with the speaker, meaning that the center of the cover does not match the center of the speaker. It is easily visible on the edges, and the difference is at least a couple of millimeters.

Conclusion

After using the speaker for a while, I have to say that I am very satisfied with it. It works great and sounds fantastic. I have been using it with everything from romantic dining music to Friday night parties, and it has worked great in every instance I have tried it.

The only thing missing is the 3.5mm audio cable which is not included in the package. Without it, I can not test the speaker when playing games such as Call of Duty, since the slight delay would cause things to become terribly confusing.

ultrathinkeyboardcover

The Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover for iPad

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The iPad is great for so many things, yet many people believe its primary usage is media consumption, in contrast to creating content. A bare iPad does not have the exact precision of a pencil, nor the same touch typing experience of a regular keyboard, making those points undeniably valid.

There are however things you can do to augment your iPad, and achieve a reasonable precision when drawing, and to get that special touch type experience you only get from a physical keyboard.

Impressions

I recently purchased a Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover for my iPad 3. Its backside resembles the brushed aluminum back of the iPad, which makes them go perfectly together. The keyboard side is made from high-gloss plastic with matte keys, and the groove where the iPad rests feels solid and will not break easily.

The keys feel firm and has a good resistance to them when pressed, and can be compared to the keys on a Macbook Pro. The keys are only marginally smaller, with the exception of the Nordic layout which have the special characters å, ä and ö pushed together next to the enter key. After a few minutes of typing though, you will get used to them and it will not bother you.

The Smart Cover magnets

The iPad has magnets to hold the Smart Cover in place. The Logitech Keyboard Cover uses these magnets to latch on to the iPad, preventing it falling off when the keyboard covers the screen.

When the iPad is docked in the keyboard groove, the magnets will latch on to the bottom, which is a great reassurance if dropping the iPad is a big concern. You can even pick up the iPad, and the keyboard cover will still hang on firmly.

It does only work in landscape mode though, since there are no opposing magnets on the portrait side of the iPad. It does work fairly well in that mode as well though, as long as the keyboard is resting on a flat surface.

Vim and escape

One of the main reasons for using the keyboard cover is to access remote servers using SSH in addition to typing articles and documents. I mostly use a combination of Diet Coda and Screen to attain some level of productivity.

The main problem however, occurs when using vim to edit files. It extensively uses the escape key, which poses a great problem since the escape key is conveniently mapped to the home button. This means that every time the escape key is pressed, the application closes and one is taken back to the home screen.

The only solution I found is to double-press the escape key, making the multitasking bar appear on the iPad, and then tap it again to get back to the application. Other than that particular gripe, things have been working very well.

Battery life

I was very skeptical when reading the specs indicating six months of usage from a single charge. This was supposed to be possible because of the magnets, which automatically powers the keyboard on and off when it is attached to the screen.

I was wrong.

I have not charged it since the unboxing, and it is still going as strong as ever. Even with it being powered on for entire days at a time. It charges using a micro-USB connector, which is right next to the power and sync buttons.

Conclusion

Having used the keyboard cover for about a month, I have found both good things and bad. I do not regret getting the keyboard and will continue to use it daily.

One issue with the keyboard cover is that it basically doubles the thickness of the iPad, making the iPad feel a bit bulky when you are carrying it around.

The main problem however, occurs when you want to use the iPad for reading, browsing or some other activity not using the keyboard. Where do one put the cover? The original Smart Cover would just fold around, but the keyboard has to be placed somewhere.

On a more positive note, writing has been a breeze and everything from instant messaging and using ssh to connect to remote servers, to writing articles and just browsing the web has become a lot faster and easier. It almost feels like typing on a real Macbook, with the exception of not having a trackpad.

iPad Mini

Looking forward, I am not sure what to do once I get the iPad Mini (the cellular version has just been released in Sweden and is out of stock). On one hand, the iPad together with the keyboard cover makes for a great workstation when on the go, but on the other hand, the iPad Mini is just too perfect to pass up. Would a similar keyboard cover for the iPad Mini work, or would the keys be too small?

Review: ThisLife

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As we grow older and experience life with all its twists and turns, there are often times of great storytelling and recollection — thinking of times gone by, reliving them in our minds and telling our friends about them. There are many aids to help us remember the past, but the one thing that has been with us for a very long time are photographs.

When you press the shutter release on your camera, time is instantly frozen and is forever materialized in that very photo. Taking that concept one step further, makes one realize that photos taken can never be created the same way ever again, which makes them all the more precious.

Even if you manage to keep all photos of your children from their infancy to adulthood, you will likely have thousands of pictures just laying in a folder on your computer, or even worse, kept on a memory card in the camera.

I have earlier talked about Crashplan, which seamlessly backs up your computer to the cloud, and can be a huge lifesaver in times of distress. There are however lots of other services focused purely on sharing and backing up your precious photos.

When thinking about photos online, most people will often think about Flickr, and rightfully so. It is probably the most used website for sharing photos today, and if you happen to have a Pro account, they will even let you download your original files. This can in essence work as a cloud backup for all your photos. Their photo organization however, is very old-school with sets and collections, but works very well. Since the website has been there for ages and rarely gets updated, it now starts to feel somewhat outdated and old-fashioned.

Another service you may have heard of is Facebook, which has probably passed Flickr on the number of uploaded photos per second. They offer free photo uploads, but images are compressed and may not look as good as you intended. They have become better though, and even show much larger pictures now that they have received some great competition from Google+. They do one thing right though — the Timeline.

Even though photos are grouped in sets, they will be displayed chronologically in your profile timeline, as they happen in your life and even have automatic highlighting of popular and important photos which makes it easier to browse the history.

The downside to sharing photos on Facebook is not being able to download uploaded originals, meaning that while Facebook may be great for sharing photos, they do not function as a cloud backup service for them, so you will still need to store your photos locally on your computer and manage backups separately.

ThisLife

There has since 2010 been a new photo sharing and backup service in the making, which has finally launched a public beta. They recently received funding from investors, which made it possible for anyone to sign up.

ThisLife is a photography website which takes strengths from many other similar services and puts them together to create a new kind of photo site.

Not only is the website visually stunning, it has the features discussed earlier, such as being able to download uploaded originals. They even have their own twist on the Facebook timeline. Instead of scrolling down to reveal older photos, think of it as a game of Super Mario – go left to reveal older photos and right to move into the future, which makes it very fun to scroll though photos with others.

There is also a bit of split-vision thinking going on, where all your photos go into the main library. From there, you can cherry-pick your favorite photos which best represent that particular time and place, and put them in the Timeline. This makes it easy to find all important photos from years back, and makes for a perfect photo album to show other people.

We like to think of your Timeline as the place to showcase your very best Moments, Milestones, and Notes. In other words, your Timeline tells your story; add Moments accordingly!

The notion of albums are gone however, and photos are instead searchable using activity, date, location and tagged people.

Want to find that picture while you were Surfing in Hawaii with Joe? Simply click icon of the magnifying glass in the upper right hand corner of your Library. Now you can sort by 3 different criteria – People, Place and Activity. Want to search by just one of those? Use the tabs in the lower right of your Library. We think of it as the “Needle in the Haystack” feature.

It takes some getting used to the notion of activities contra sets and albums. It is however very clever and has many strengths when searching for photos.

For the family

The founders of ThisLife, a couple named Matt and Andrea Johnson were not happy with any of the Flickr or Facebook clones out there, so they decided to create their own website to store photos of their kids and vacations. This means that there is a big focus on family and sharing, in contrast with for instance 500px, which is more focused on professional photography.

One of the family features is the ability to invite others into your account, which is perfect within a family where you can invite your spouse, and both of you can add photos of your life together to the now in common photo stream.

Face detection

A big challenge, especially when taking photos of children, is the fact that they grow up. ThisLife has gone to great lengths to account for the fact that people’s faces change as they get older. Since I currently do not have any children, it was hard for me to try out this very feature, but having uploaded lots of other albums, I can attest to the exceptional performance in the face recognition technology, as it got a near 100 percent hit-rate.

One central hub

Getting started with a new service usually means that one has to find photos on your computer, select the ones you want and then upload them. ThisLife does of course let you do it, and exceptionally well using their uploading software.

They do in addition to this however, have the ability to pull in images from Facebook and Instagram among others, which means that getting started filling your account is as simple as approving a few authorization requests.

Sharing

When it comes to showing your photos to the world, there are a few options to choose from. Sharing a single photo works as expected – you can either email it, tweet it or send if off to Facebook.

There is however no way to share a collection of photos, which is a huge downer, since I would imagine wanting the ability to share an event with others. That is something that will surely be added in the future.

Bugs

In the settings menu, there was a link to enable the Flash version of the site. I clicked it, and it reloaded as expected, and this time the whole interface was Flash powered. There is one problem though, it seems to be impossible to revert back to the excellent HTML5 version of the site, once the Flash button has been clicked. After a quick response from their friendly Twitter support account @ThisLife, I managed to revert back adding “/html5” to the URL.

There are other minor annoyances as well. For instance, when clicking on an image, you are expecting the image to show up and display comments, export options etc. The image does indeed popup, but sometimes the interface locks up and it doesn’t finish loading, leaving the website unusable. It is then impossible to close the image, and a full reload is required. Since this only happens sometimes and is not critical, I can definitely accept that will be expecting an update addressing this in the future.

iPhone and iPad

There are free apps available for both iPhone and iPad, which connects to your account and presents the same fantastic graphical interface one is used to now in the website. They share the same features, and enables you to view, share and upload new photos on the go.

Price

When trusting a photo service to store and display your photos, you will have to pay for most of them. The only free service mentioned earlier is Facebook, but since it will not allow downloading the uploaded originals, it is disqualified.

Left is Flickr, where a one-year commitment will set you back $24.95, but provides unlimited upload of photos and videos, in addition to statistics and an ad-free browsing experience. 500px has a similar service, where you pay $19.95 per year and receive similar benefits as Flickr.

How does ThisLife stack up? Since the free plan only allows for 1000 pictures or 1 hour of video, you will likely need to upgrade if you plan to use it seriously. The medium plan sets you back $79.99 per year, and allows you to upload 20,000 photos or 10 hours of video. Their biggest plan allows you to upload 50,000 photos or 25 hours of video and costs $149,99 per year.

Conclusion

It is hard to argue against using beautiful software and websites, and this is not an exception. This is a user-friendly website which will suit most people just fine. Supporting a bundle of platforms using different technologies like html5, Flash and iOS applications is an excellent way of making the people who try out the service, stay there.

ThisLife supports uploading of text snippets in addition photos and videos using email, but I could not figure out how to do this via the website. Presumably, this is a feature which will be implemented in future versions. I could see this being built out as more of a personal log or diary, and with accompanying photos and videos, it could be a potential killer in that market as well.

The one thing I found to be somewhat restricting is the ability to share albums. While ThisLife has no notion of albums, being able to publish a specific event at specific time would be fantastic.

When comparing prices for different photo sharing websites, ThisLife came out on top as being priciest of them all. They are rumored to use Amazon S3 for storage, so that price-point may be a bit over the top for pure storage, but the fantastic website and all services do cost to develop, run and maintain.

I have not had extensive contact with their support, but asked a simple question over Twitter. The response was prompt, very friendly and helpful, so kudos for having a fantastic support channel.

ThisLife definitely fills a space which recently has opened up, I guess mostly due to Facebook’s Timeline feature, which was released earlier this year. Other similar websites have been starting to crop up, such as Months of Me, so there are exciting times ahead in the personal memory websites.

Offsite backups using CrashPlan – review

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With the World Backup Day in our rear-view mirror, giving a second thought to our backup needs become utterly apparent. Most computer professionals probably have some kind of nagging voice inside their heads reminding them of creating backups, which works fine to some extent, until realizing that all backups are in-house and will be lost in case of a fire.

People tend to have no backup at all however, and adding a cloud based backup solution would greatly benefit these kinds of users. There are a lot of options though, and finding one that suits a particular need is not the easiest thing to accomplish.

Given that modern age files are quite large, with photo libraries containing 20 Gb worth of pictures every year or more, having a solution with unlimited storage, or as cheap as possible per gigabyte, is crucial. Not only that, setup has to be minimal and it should by default backup everything in the normal documents folder, music and other type of user-created content.

Needs

Having a DSLR camera that outputs raw files at about 10 Mb per photo, which within in a year amounts to 10 to 40 Gb worth of pictures, a remote backup solution with plentiful of storage is desperately needed. Other types of media include captured HD video files of irreplaceable moments and bought music, which together amounts to hundred of gigabytes worth of precious and irreplaceable data.

This means that my storage needs are quite large and increasing by the day, which means that a reasonably cheap and fast service is needed, which in addition is reliable and as secure as possible. These demands might sound like an oxymoron, but finding the perfect backup solution should encompass all these properties in some way.

I would also like a service which is reasonably priced for at least three computers backing up to the same account, but preferably being able to use at least five computers would be optimal. This means that backing up my parents’ computer to the same account will be a breeze and with no extra cost.

The whole reason for having a cloud based backup is to have my precious data available off-site, and to make things easier, the service should preferably have reasonable download and upload speeds and its agent should be able to operate without intervention when everything is configured and running.

Alternatives

When deciding to use a cloud based backup solution, there is a wide array of applications and services to consider. There are different types of backup services, and the most common ones are probably file synchronization services such as Dropbox and box.net.

While their goal is to synchronize files between different computers and other devices, they also have the ability to backup versions of the file when they change or are deleted. This provides an excellent solution for sharing document and other files when collaborating with other people, or when working on the same content using different devices. Storage is however not cheap if you plan to store more than a couple of gigabytes worth of data.

On the other side, there are backup software which usually do not have the file synchronization capability, but are more focused on keeping backups of your files, with no bells and whistles. The benefit of using something like this instead, is that cloud space is usually cheaper, with many backup providers claiming “unlimited” space.

There are a lot of players in this market however, such as SpiderOak and BackBlaze. While SpiderOak could possibly be a descent service, it would be too expensive for my storage needs. At the rate of $10 per 100 Gb, with how many computers you like, it however becomes apparent that this is an excellent service if your storage needs do not exceed that first tier of 100 Gb.

Backblaze on the other hand has a native Mac client and offers an easy plan of $5 per computer and month for unlimited storage. One of the key features however is their restore service, which means that they can overnight you a hard drive or DVD with your data for a fast restore. There is just one problem with this service — the data on the chosen media is sent unencrypted!

That brings me to the topic of security, and that no one of the services above have (to my knowledge) support for using your own encryption key. This means having to trust the provider to keep your password and key secure, instead of knowing that your own encryption key never leaves your computer.

CrashPlan

Another option I considered was CrashPlan, which was featured on the World Backup Day website. Having never tried it or even heard of it before, I was reluctant to consider it. The client is also written in Java, making it easier to run on multiple platforms, but memory and performance issues are usually lurking.

The user interface is quite pleasing to the eye, and once the client is initially launched and an account is created, a backup of the home directory is started automatically. Most people would be satisfied with leaving the application in its default state, since their entire account would be backed up. There is however a lot more than meets the eye at first glance.

Destinations

The most prominent feature when starting the application is the destination selection, providing the ability to backup using different storage endpoints. While backing up to “CrashPlan Central” will cost you money, the other backup options are free.

If you have a friend running CrashPlan, you can add each other as destinations for the backups, giving both parties the benefits of off-site backups while still using the free version. You will however need to provide enough storage for each others’ backup needs, which is not free in itself.

The same procedure can be used between different computers within your own account. They can act as destinations as well, potentially providing you will off-site backups if you have computers at different physical locations.

Speed

As mentioned earlier on, having an online backup together with a large backup size requires plentiful of bandwidth to work properly. Having backed up a considerable amount of data to the CrashPlan servers, there was a big difference in how fast the server nodes were able to receive the data.

Before measuring the upload speed, the settings for CPU and bandwidth usage were tweaked to allow maximum throughput. My internet link is a 100 Mbit fiber connection, so if there are any delays or bandwidth issues, they reside on the server side.

I started backing up my music collection on my Macbook Pro, which performed at a fairly constant rate at 3.2 Mbit/s. Even though this was fairly slow, it was bearable, give my not so large music library on this particular computer.

Backing up on the NAS was a completely different story however. Another server was chosen as the target for the backup (this is done automatically), but this time around, the throughput maxed out at about 700 Kbit/s at times, which is terribly slow if the data to be backed up exceeds 100 Gb, which it did in this case.

Security

Having a backup solution in the cloud inherently raises privacy and security concerns. A lot of people will be uneasy giving up their data to a third party without knowing their data is safe from prying eyes.

CrashPlan uses Blowfish with a 448 bit key to secure the data at rest, and the communication is additionally encrypted using normal SSL connections with AES and a 256 bit key. The Blowfish key is then escrowed together with your data on the CrashPlan servers, encrypted with your account password.

For most people, the above solution is perfect, given the simple nature of the setup. The end user never has to touch the encryption key or remember anything more complicated than their own account password. When restoring files on a new computer, it is just the matter of logging into the account and restoring the files from the server.

The downside of this solution is that there is no way to partition the associated computer within the account, meaning that any computer logged into the user account can restore any file from any computer to the local computer.

There is another security mode which separates the encryption key with the user account. That way, you still have the CrashPlan user account, but the encryption key is protected with another password. The benefits of using this mode is that different computers can have different passwords, and thus separate encryption keys. This fixes the problem with all computers being able to access all information on each server associated with the account.

The third option is to provide the encryption key directly instead of using passwords to encrypt the key stored on the server. This means that it is impossible for someone without knowledge of the encryption key to decrypt the data. The downside is that the key needs to be kept secure, since it needs to be provided when doing a data restore. Having the key on paper in a safety deposit box or some other secure location will be necessary, since losing the key means that it will be impossible to decrypt the data on the CrashPlan servers.

Security conscious people will undoubtedly distrust the implementation of the client handling the encryption key. Who knows if the key is secretly transmitted to CrashPlan without the user’s knowledge?

Conclusion

Having started the trial of CrashPlan only a few days ago, I have yet to uncover severe behavior and inconsistencies. It has been a fairly smooth ride so far setting up my own encryption key and backing up three computers.

There was however one weird kink when creating and using keys for encryption. When the key was created on the Windows platform, it could for some reason not be validated on the Mac, which at first made me doubt the service. However, when I created a new key on the Mac, it could successfully be used both on the Mac and in Windows, as well as my Linux server.

If you are planning to use CrashPlan on the Mac, you may experience an unusually high memory load, which is partly the result of CrashPlan being executed using 64 bit Java. There is a simple way to change to 32 bit execution however, which involves editing /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist and adding “-d32” to the ProgramArguments section. For other memory optimizations and a discussion, have a look at the Reduce memory usage thread on the CrashPlan forums.

Another thing which could be improved upon are upload and download speeds, which are abysmal compared to the available throughput. The speed when backing up my Mac seemed to stabilize at about 3.2 Mbit/s and the speed on my NAS is running at about 1 Mbit/s. Extremes ranged from about 500 Kbit/s to 20 Mbit/s, which is basically all over the place. Not that this is usually a problem once the initial backup has completed, but it could be a lot faster. This is also one of the reasons I am hesitant to become a member once the trial has run out, but I may change my mind, since it is extremely convenient.

The other reason however, is privacy. While I am confident that CrashPlan does not “backup” my encryption key once I have chosen to use my own, there could be programming errors or other problems, exposing this key in some manner.

The alternative would be to setup a backup server at some location with plenty of disk space to mirror all my data, including changes made to file and using some kind of rsync snapshot solution. This requires a somewhat hefty investment on the hardware side however, while CrashPlan is ready to backup anything I throw at it.

When the trial expiration starts to creep up, I will hopefully have some more insight into reasons to stay or quit. Until then, I am staying with CrashPlan.

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How I Met Your Mother

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How I Met Your Mother is a series about five close friends living in New York. We follow them as they struggle through their lives, helping and supporting each other. They all have their own unique personalities and it is amazing to see them develop and enrichen during the course of the five seasons that have currently passed.

Rating: ★★★★★★★★★☆ 

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