gadgets – Page 4 – Observations from Uppsala

Biking topic 2: Bike mounts for cars with no towbar!

One thing that has always annoyed me is that you seemed to have to have a tow bar (dragkrok in Swedish) on your car to be able to fit a bike mount. And tow bars are not that common, there are several good reasons not to get one, like added cost, not usually available on used cars, and that they compromise crash safety to some extent. But to put my bike on a car it seemed that I had to get one. I was thinking about how to build a bike mount that could actually work on a regular station wagon by making use of the cargo rails, in some clever way.

But it seems I do not have to invent and build and market this thing myself: it is already available! I found a whole set of varieties from a company called Thule when I browsed a biking catalogue recently. Seems to fit quite a few varieties of cars including even the odd sedan! Good to know that they exist if I ever need to carry bikes regularly.

Biking topic 1: I should have a commission on these!

Last year, we got ourselves one of the best child-related products we have ever seen: a Chariot Carriers Corsaire XL bike carriers. This might sound like marketing hype from their marketing department, but it really is a brilliantly designed product (mostly). At core, it is a carrier with two wheels, seating two children, and which can be quickly turned from a bike carrier into a regular city stroller. For us, this really means freedom! In particular, the freedom to quickly pop down town using the bike, and then not have to carry our son but rather have a decent stroller to push him around in (and to load up with shopped stuff).

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Off-topic: P990i Sync Working at Last

At long last, the sync software for my SonyEricsson P990i mobile phone has started to work as it should. I have had an issue with synching of contacts since back in the days of my P900, where for some reason it would delete most of the contacts from my phone when synchronizing. I never managed to quite work out why, but I suspect it had something to do with a combination of contacts being in an unusual place in Outlook, and there being some 1600 of them when I was also synchronizing Outlook with a Salesforce install we used to have.

There were workarounds like forced sync in place that kept the phone very useful. But now, with version 1.5.8 of the PCSuite for Smartphones, it has started to work as it should have all along. Nice. Too bad this is coming pretty late in the life of this phone, got it almost two years ago and after the summer it is time to see what they have got to replace it. The P1i is too similar to the P990i to be worthwhile, waiting for the next-gen UIQ phone after that.

And yes, I do like the UIQ phones. They have their quirks, sure, but they also have lots of nice features. And for me, they tend to just work as you expect. Since I have learnt to use them, I guess. But in any case, next phone is likely also a SonyEricsson P-something.

Off-Topic: Video in the iPod Nano (Update, updated once)

A short update to the previous posting on how to compress video for the nano.

It turns out that the “iPod video” profile of Nero Recode is half aimed at showing video from your iPod on external devices. That’s the only good reason for the “high” resolution. I typically got a video size of 15MB per minute with these settings, which quickly fills up even gigabytes of space.

Using the “iPod Video-AVC” profile instead is optimized for viewing on the Nano itself and not on some external device. The resolution is down to 320×200-240 depending on source aspect ratio. And the resulting files are only about 5MB per minute, much more manageable for carrying a large video library on an iPod. I cannot see any difference in the quality of the output…

Update (2007-September-23): The default iPod-AVC setting has some issue with rapid cross-fades between scenes. To get around this, I set the quality settings to “2-pass” and “highest quality” in the detailed settings you can make in the second screen before moving on to actually encode things. This created very nice looking video that had no problems handling even the previously broken fades.

The cost was even more compute time. I think the current settings takes some 5 to 10 hours per material hour to encode (on my Athlon XP 2700+, not exactly a screamer by current standards).

Off-Topic: Getting video onto an iPod Nano (3G/Video)

This is not in my self-assigned range of topics, but I like when other people put up their helpful notes of how to accomplish some task that I am researching. Thus, I feel obliged to do the same when I have tested something reasonably new.

The task at hand here is “how to get video into an iPod Nano”.

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