Returning to the US, I had to buy a lot of new household electronics. No, that UK TV won’t work over here. Or the DVD. Or the Xbox. Or the telephones. Or the … you get the point. Best Buy turned out to be my port of call for most of this stuff, to the point that if I never have to go back there, my life might be joyous and complete. But a bright spot — thanks to my purchases, my “Reward Zone” membership was upgraded to Premier Black yesterday. And today, Best Buy took that away before I even figured out what Reward Zone Premier Black was.

Let’s do the happy email I got yesterday:

We’d like to welcome you to the Best Buy® Reward Zone® program at our most elite membership level – Premier Black.

Premier Black is a pilot in select areas that rewards our best customers for shopping at Best Buy stores.

Hurray! Vindication of a life well spent. I mean money well spent. I mean, money spent. I am in the elite at last! What do I get?

• FASTER REWARDS WITH YOUR PREMIER BLACK POINT BONUS
• EXCLUSIVE SHOPPING SERVICES
• PERSONAL ATTENTION FROM YOUR REWARD ZONE® PROGRAM PREMIER BLACK CONCIERGE

Plus, you get to enjoy the benefits of Premier Silver:

• Free shipping at BestBuy.com®
• 45-day extended return policy
• Point banking and our Premier-only Awards Catalog
• Special services from Geek Squad®

Your Premier Black Concierge can make your shopping experience even better by finding answers to your product questions, locating out-of-stock products, giving you special access to the store and more

Exciting! But then today, after I’ve barely had time to digest all these new services I was expecting to regularly use, I got a new email:

The Best Buy® Reward Zone® program is always looking at ways to make our program even better for our members. Today, you may have inadvertently and inaccurately received the below message during an initial email testing process. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience or confusion. You continue to maintain your current membership status. If you are eligible for the Reward Zone program Premier Black test that will run in a limited number of select markets, we will notify you by a separate email. If you have any questions about this or the Reward Zone program, please visit www.MyRewardZone.com or contact our Customer Service Center at 1-888-237-8289. Thank you.

Well shucks. And what’s worse, the emails prompted me to actually go online just now to see what status I have. I don’t even seem to have been upgraded to Premier Silver. I’m sure that will come as my account status catches up with my purchases. And maybe someday, I’ll be in the elite again.

Curious, I just checked to see if there was any news on all this. CrunchGear covers being accepted and rejected, as does News.com.

Wow — first the Ginsu knife
man dies, now the inventor of the
Aeron chair has passed away, Valleywag

says, pointing at a New York Times

write-up.

Unlike a Ginsu knife, I did buy an Aeron chair. Sure, it was expensive and a
symbol of Silicon Valley exuberance. But it’s also the best chair I’ve ever
owned, one just past six years of use. The Staples generic office chair it
replaced made it only about two years.

I’m in my chair for 8 to 10 hours per day easily. When I first started
working from home, with money tight as often the case for any new consultant,
buying quality office furniture wasn’t at the top of my list. I went to
Staples (yes, they’ve got them here in
the UK) and picked out one of those standard blue chairs pretty similar to what
you see

here.

About two years later, it was falling apart. Screws kept dropping out of the
bottom of it, plus I could see the welds literally breaking loose because of
heavy use.

I needed a better chair. I’d heard about the Aeron and sat in a couple during
some visits to people in real offices. It seemed nice.

Herman Miller, which makes the
chair, actually had a factory or office or something out near Bath, relatively
close to my house. So I made a trip out, tried out the chair a bit more and
decided to buy one. It was about $900 at the time, about 10 times the price of
my Staples cheapie.

I’ve never regretted the purchase. The chair still looks and feels great.
It’s comfortable and gives every indication it’ll go another six years easily
for me.

Soon I hope to do an update on how well my
TomTom 910 GPS performed last
month getting me around California. But tangentially, some donut news, one of my
favorite subjects. We’re getting more
Dunkin’ Donuts nationwide (the
nation of the US, that is). And I’ll even make it TomTom related.

See, when I got my new TomTom, I also got into wanting to use it to locate
nearby merchants. I especially wanted a list of all the Targets. I went looking
for a list to download into it and had no luck. But I did come across
this database
of nearly 5,000 Dunkin’ Donuts locations in the US.

It’s neat. Download the POI list to your TomTom, and then you can search for
the nearest one. I did, from my location in California, and the closest was in
Massachusetts. Sniff.

That wasn’t a shock to me. I
already written how they’d all seemed to have disappeared from Southern
California, where I grew up. But on my next East Coast trip, this is going to be
great. I’ll be able to locate them — or even better, have the DD logo showing
up on the TomTom screen if I’m getting near one when just driving along.

The whole thing make me think that as a retailer, putting out POI databases
of your stores needs to be a new marketing move. Of course, I also discovered
that the TomTom already has a really good database in it that lets you find
these type of places. It worked wonderfully to get me to the local Target or
Toys R Us or whatever. But those places didn’t get to have their logos show up
to alert me beforehand.

I’ll talk more about that in the future. For now, back to the donuts.

Big Fight Brews For Average Joe in the Washington Post coves how Washington
DC and Baltimore are about to get more stores as part of 10,000 that are to
rollout over the next decade. Of course, I’d already posted that Dunking Donuts
was going to do an expansion. Now it really looks to be happening.

But come on — Chicago’s getting more? Chicago already seems to have one on
every street corner, much to my happiness. Show California some of that old time
love we had. Or someone bring in the Tim Hortons. Mmm –
Tim Hortons, yum.

Forget exploding liquids. The Wall Street Journal has a scary article today (paid reg. required) about laptop batteries catching fire on airplanes. From the opening:

Passengers aboard Lufthansa Flight 435 at Chicago O’Hare International Airport on May 15 were settling in for the nine-hour haul to Munich, Germany, when a burning odor floated into the first-class cabin. According to witnesses, the luggage bin above seat 2A was burping smoke.

Flight attendants evacuated first class just before a computer case in the compartment began to spit fire. The crew grabbed extinguishers and sprayed the bin. Someone swung open a cabin door, snatched the case and tossed it onto the ramp. The case erupted in flames. As passengers watched, fire trucks — then the bomb squad — roared to the scene and put out the blaze. But they found no terrorist device. Instead, authorities discovered a charred laptop computer and a six-pack of melted lithium-ion batteries. [Laptop Fire Graphic]

Long before last week’s foiled plot to blow up airlines using material secreted in carry-on luggage, a growing number of transportation and product-safety officials had expressed concerns that batteries in laptops and other electronics pose a serious risk to airplanes — for reasons completely unrelated to global terror.

The FAA has logged only 60 incidents like this since 1991, the article says, so the risk seems very small. But it also seems to be growing given the greater use of lithium-ion batteries.

The current restrictions out of Heathrow have many wondering how they’ll survive long flights without their laptops. And while those restrictions seems likely to go away in the short-term, what if someone comes up with a way to purposely generate the thermal runaway that the article talks about:

The problem, experts say, is “thermal runaway” — a chemical reaction inside a battery cell that generates intense heat so rapidly that it flares out of control. Most of the failures are traced to a short circuit in the cell or the wires that connect the cell to contact points on the battery pack. Richard L. Stern, associate director of compliance at the Consumer Product Safety Commission, says tiny metal shards can contaminate the battery pack during assembly and later pierce the insulation separating the positive and negative terminals. The opposite poles touch and create an electrical spark. A defective or damaged battery that is vigorously jostled — like a laptop rattling around in a luggage compartment — can trigger a flare.

Stuff like that makes you think laptops as we know them may be going away. Maybe we’ll only be able to use laptops that are approved and rented to us, as Jeff Jarvis is suggesting. Or maybe we’ll only be able to run laptops with batteries removed and off the power-ports airlines provide. Maybe solid-state laptops using standard batteries will emerge.

By the way, the article talks about a UPS plane that was destroyed earlier this year when a load of batteries seems to have caught fire. Coincidentally, I was just on an air safety site with pretty dramatic pictures of the gutted plane yesterday.

I’d come across the site when trying to find out if there’s any place that lists near-misses at airports. I wanted to learn more about the aborted landing my plane had to make when I came into Heathrow this weekend.

That site didn’t come through for me, unfortunately. Nor did some further searches I tried. That made it seem a perfect test for Yahoo Answers, which gets touted as an easy way for others to share knowledge when ordinary web search fails.

So far my question, Info On Aborted Landing At Heathrow?, has only got one answer back from a person who simply wanted points, not to help. I bet Gary Price will know the right database out there. Gary, expect me to IM you!

I wrote before about my TomTom Go 700 portable GPS system. Now I’ve graduated to the newer version, the TomTom 910. I hadn’t expected to make the jump so soon, but a number of things came together to push me toward this nice new device.

My old TomTom Go 700 was great, but maps were only for Europe. As a result, I depended on using TomTom Navigator 5 on my Dell Axim PDA for trips to the US, since I have US maps for that. Sadly, on my last trip, I made the mistake of plugging the car charger not into the PDA cradle but instead into the Bluetooth GPS receiver. Smoke, literally smoke, came out of it as I put 12 volts into a socket that only wanted 5 volts.

Ouch. There went my solution for GPS when driving in the US. Of course, perhaps it was fate. I was well tired of using my PDA for satellite navigation. You have to hook up the PDA cradle to the windshield, then plug the charger into the cradle, then put the PDA in the cradle, then run the cable from the charger into the Bluetooth receiver, then plug the sound cable from the PDA into the cradle….hassle. With an all in one Tom Tom, you hang it on the windshield, plug in the charger if you really want, and you’re done.

More fate. Soon after this happened, the new TomTom range was announced. While I was debating an upgrade, a friend said he was interested in getting a TomTom Go 700 for trips between England and France. So now he’s off using my old TomTom, while I’m driving along with the new one. Gotta love fate!

Some links, then some comparisons between the two devices, from my perspective. Product info is here. Pocket GPS World has a very nice review here: Inside the TomTom GO 910. And that done, here are my thoughts.

The first reason I wanted the TomTom 910 was that it has both European and US maps stored on its 20 GB hard drive. That gives me a solution for both countries — as well as Canada, Guam and the Canary Islands!

It also locks on to satellites faster. My old TomTom could take a couple of minutes to get going from a cold start. The new one only takes seconds. Nice!

It’s slightly smaller and has a widescreen. Widescreen, square screen — doesn’t make that much of a difference to me, but the smaller size for carrying is nice.

The new version can do RDS-TMC, which means listen to regular radio transmissions for traffic alerts and keep me notified. The bad news is, that’s not built in. You have to buy an external antenna, which is annoying. And you can’t even buy them yet at all. Keep a watch for when they are offered here.

The new version can play MP3 files. I’ll come back to this, but it’s very handy. Unfortunately, the interface for adding music sucks. You either have to select individual songs to copy across (hmm, which of my hundreds of tracks will I select one by one) or you copy across playlists. I don’t have playlists, but I’ll have to start making these to move music to the TomTom faster. It would be nice if you could see songs by albums or artists and tick across selections that way. (Note — it’s also pretty likely that simply browsing to the TomTom in Windows Explorer will allow you to drag and drop music. Haven’t tried it yet, but a quick look makes me hopeful).

You can also put pictures on it (and with a third party hack covered in that Pocket GPS World article, even play movies). I put a few pictures on the device, but it wasn’t a killer feature for me.

Speed camera locations — now that was a killer feature. It comes with a list of known speed cameras for various countries, including the UK. There were ways to put this into the old TomTom, but now it’s built in and much easier to use.

How’s it working so far? I’ve done three trips so far in the run up to the real hammering it will get on my upcoming US trip.

My first trip was from Heathrow out to Wiltshire. I’d got my TomTom from Dixons in the duty free area, hence me using it to get me back from the airport even though I know the way cold. I just wanted to see how it worked.

I pre-plotted a route, to test if selecting points of interest had improved. I wrote previously how annoying it was that there was no way to search by name for points. Now you can. Choose Navigate To, Point Of Interest, POI Near You (or another option), then Any POI Category, then within a set range (say 150 miles near you), then start typing letters to see if there’s a match for what you’re looking for. Doing this found Stourhead, something that puzzled me with the TomTom 700 earlier this year. It could be a heck of a lot easier, but it’s at least possible now. And locating Heathrow was a heck of a lot easier

Route planning is fast, and off I went. It quickly starting flagging speed cameras on the M25, giving me chimes and then showing a countdown to them. Very handy. The only downside is that it didn’t know construction is done near Heathrow and so the 40 MPH restriction is gone. Instead, there’s a variable speed limit that is shown by signs. So it warned me I was speeding, when I wasn’t. Keep checking those signs.

I love a new feature that shows you the speed limit of roads you are traveling on, if these are known. But I hate the fact that if you go more than five miles per hour above that limit, it changes to a red color and starts flashing.

Say you’re on the motorway. It would show you something like this: 68/70. That tells you you’re going 68 with a limit of 70. Now if you step up to 75, it shows you this: 75/70. But instead of white text, it changes to very hard to read deep red and begins flashing. I wish there was an option to disable this, but so far, no luck.

I quickly noticed something many people are commenting on — mount droop. Slowly, the monitor starts to droop on its mount. It’s easily corrected with a gentle push up, but it’s not something you should have to do. And toward the end of my trip, when I went from the motorway to B roads, a big bump made it drop almost straight-down. In addition, a big bump — or when you’d put the unit back up, would cause it to disconnect from the power supply contacts in the mount. It’s not a big deal for me, but those with older 910s had a big problem because a power disconnect would cause the unit to go off. New software has fixed this.

I’ll come back mount issues in a bit, but back to my first trip. The TomTom can also interact with your phone (or phones, it can remember several), just as the old one can. If you have the right phone (I don’t), it will even read text messages to you. This is because it has a new computerized voice, rather than just the prerecorded ones.

The computerized voice is also handy because it will read road names to you. The convinced me to leave behind my old voice Jane, with her nice British accent, for Kate. Kate’s also British, she’s just a computerized voice. She sounds pretty good, though I feel some guilt over having left Jane behind.

Kate’s funny, though. She kept calling the motorway the freeway. Now being a Californian, that kind of made me happy. But it feels wrong. When in Britain, I call them motorways — and so should British Kate. But this might be because although I chose a British voice, my language preference is set to English US rather than English UK. Someday, maybe I’ll even test this to find out.

Kate’s also funny in that she says road numbers incorrectly. Well, just differently. Say you’re on the A303. Everyone will call that the Three Oh Three. But formal Kate, she calls it the Three Hundred Three. On a B road, she starts getting into thousands. I can’t wait to get back to Southern California and see if she calls the 405 the Four Hundred and Five rather than the Four Oh Five.

My second trip was an easy run to the local leisure center. Again, I knew the way — I just wanted to test things out. I always take the GPS down and even remove the mount for security reasons. So when heading back home, I had to put it back into place. That’s easy, but then I was shocked to watch the unit fall off the windshield. I put it back up again, taking care to make sure it was twisting it the way it should. Down it came again, and this time the splash screen didn’t go off. No menu, no nothing.

Great — I was annoyed that the mount clearly doesn’t work well, plus that perhaps the hard drive was now crashed. A reset button was nowhere in sight, and pushing the main power button didn’t help.

When I got home, I discovered that to reset the unit, you have to turn it upside down, then there’s a hard-to-find reset slot where a paper clip can be used. Fortunately, pushing that was all I needed to get the unit going again.

Still, the mount issue was a problem. Going online, I came across plenty of people reporting issues. The article I mentioned earlier talks about this, as well. I didn’t know if I wanted to keep the device with these problems.

TomTom’s clearly aware of these issues. For one, they’ve had to make special page completely with video to explain how to use the mount. That illustrates it’s a bad mount, not that all the TomTom users are idiots, I’d say.

For two, I wrote them using the online support system asking about the issue.

I’ve just purchased the TomTom 910 and had it fall off the windshield twice even though it was connected properly. In addition, any bump, and it starts to slip. I understand many are having similar mount problems. What’s the status of shipping a better mount? I love my old TomTom, want to love the new one, but the mount problems are a serious issue and I may have to return the device

Within a day, I got this reply:

It would seem your mount is at fault and we will have another one sent to you.

And then after I submitted my address, I was told I’d be sent this:

TomTom GO 510/710/910 Mount incl. Docking Shoe (no POR) [L]

I don’t know if this means I’m getting an improved mount or just another one like I have already. I’ll do a follow up when it arrives — unfortunately, not in time for me to use on my upcoming trip.

My third trip was an hour drive up to the International Air Tattoo north of Swindon. By this point, I’d loaded up some music and was curious to see how that worked.

Touch the screen, and there’s a Music & Photos icon on the first menu that comes up. Select TomTom Jukebox, and you get another screen showing playlists, plus options for artists, albums, songs, genres or audiobooks. Even though you can’t move music over by artist or album, once in TomTom, it at least organizes them this way using your MP3 tags.

Pick your options, and the music starts playing out of the unit. It’s a bit tinny, but it’s workable and will be handy for those times when I’m in a rental car or something.

Actually, it’s better than that. I hooked up my FM transmitter that I use for my iPod to the unit’s external port. Boom — really good quality music was now flowing out of my car stereo. Even better, when navigational instructions come on, the music pauses, then picks up from where it left off.

I’m looking forward to trying things out more on my next trip. I even downloaded Bodie The Surfer Voice for free to get ready.

I’ve long promised to do a big write-up about my Microsoft MSN Direct SPOT watch, and I promise, it’s coming soon. I have a long plane ride coming up next week where I plan to get it done. But given the news of Google now giving mobile traffic information, I wanted to do a quick thing about how I get awesome real time traffic via my watch.

The Spot Watch gets information via FM radio in the US and Canada that Microsoft broadcasts. Each watch has its own identity code. After you buy one, you go to MSN Direct, register your watch, pick the information you want to receive, and it all starts flowing your way. Usually. My longer post will explain the many oddities. But let’s talk traffic, for now.

There’s a traffic channel described more here. For many metropolitan areas, you can have traffic incidents sent to your watch — accidents, road closures, etc. Here’s the fuzzy real life example from my own watch example a few weeks ago:

Incidents are fine, but what rocks are route alerts. You can create up to six routes that you want to monitor, for areas where route maps are supported. You pick a starting and ending location, then you are shown a map with various traffic monitoring points on it. Each route can have up to five monitoring points.

Here’s a nice, clean image from Microsoft showing what you get in response (this one for the Seattle area):

Each point you pick is shown on the watch face, with the current traffic speed underneath. The darker the dot, the slower the speed. Trend arrows also show if things are improving or not.

I’m often driving from San Francisco Airport to Google along the 101, so I whipped up quick route to give me the southbound traffic, picking five points along the way. My real-life example:

I was a bit dubious about how useful this would be. After all, who wants to mess with their watch while driving. But I was really surprised. Set the watch face to show traffic, and it’s very easy to glance at it as part of your regular scan of mirrors, windows, instruments, etc. For example (and pardon my hairy wrist):

That’s a real life view of what you’d see driving along. Don’t worry. I was stuck in traffic stopped at the time — and the watch was accurate in telling me the rough speed for where I was.

There are better ways to get traffic on the move, I’m sure. But the watch was handier than I expected — and when I was leaving Google on that day, a quick push of the button told me what the northbound traffic was going to be like. Sure, I could do it via my phone, by going to a computer, etc — but in only a few seconds, my wristwatch gave me a fast update.

Postscript, Oct. 28, 2009: My watch ended up being more a fad for me. In the end, I found it fairly bulky to wear. As it also worked only when I was in the US (I lived in the UK at the time), I didn’t use it as much as I might have if I were in the US. And by the time I moved back to the US last year, getting traffic information via my phone (not to mention other info) was much easier. Clearly I wasn’t the only one to move on. Microsoft announced today that the MSN Direct service will close in 2012.

About two months ago, I purchased an digital picture frame that I highly recommend to anyone who wants to see their digital photos easily without resorting to printing them out. My frame is a Philips 7FF1AW/05, as shown below.

I’d seen electronic photo frames before, but they were always so absurdly priced. I made the jump because PC World in the UK was running a special offer, £99 (about $180).

I know, I know — that’s still pretty expensive, but it was far better than the typical $300 to $500 prices I recall seeing for such devices in the past.

It’s a brilliant piece of kit — ie, a great gadget, since it’s so easy to use. It comes with a CD and USB connectivity, but I’ve never plugged into my computer. No need. This is because you can slot a memory card into the back of it, and the frame starts showing pictures off the card. Compact Flash, Memory Stick, MMC or SD all work.

Currently, I’ve got a 512 MB SD card shoved into it with about 140 pictures, and there’s plenty of room left if I want to add more. Once the card’s in, you set the frame to do a slideshow display, and away you go. The software’s all contained in the frame, and it’s very smart and easy to use.

For example, you can control the frequency of how often photos change (less than five seconds? 10-15 seconds? 5 minutes? these are just some of the options). You have a choice of effects used for changing pictures (fade, slide, scroll, random and more). Pictures can be shown randomly or in sequential order.

My frame is oriented horizontally, but you can shift it to be vertical, if you want — both using the software to rotate the pictures automatically and the stand that will prop it up correctly.

The picture quality is wonderful. Honestly, your digital photos look like they’ve been printed out. That’s the best thing about this — finally, all those digital pictures are easily on display on something other than your computer, your laptop or your TV (if you’re like me and burn photo CDs).

I had trouble finding the right spot for the frame. At first, I wanted it on a bookcase or somewhere in the house where it could be seen when walking by. But the frame’s a bit too small for that. While it’s pitched as being 7 inches, that’s a diagonal measurement. The picture size is roughly 3×5.

In the end, I placed it on my desk, where it keeps me happy through the day. I switch it off manually at night, but there’s also an auto-off feature you can use, so it will turn itself on and off during a set period. At first, I could never get this to work, but on a recent trip, it finally starting working OK for some reason.

A trip? That’s right — I take this puppy on trips with me. It’s perfect to set up on a table next to my bed in a hotel room, and then I’ve got my family with me, at least in digital form. It’s extremely light and portable.

The only downside to this is my power transformer for the frame has a UK plug. It’s 110-220, so I don’t need a step-down transformer. But I do have to carry an adaptor to make the UK plug fit into a US outlet.

Of course, I could just depend on the battery. Unplug the frame, and it will keep going for apparently about an hour on its internal battery. It also has internal storage, so you can copy photos (about 50 I think) into the frame and not use a memory card at all.

Overall, it’s just got me wishing for more. Why can’t a regular LCD monitor have these type of smarts built in? Then I’d hang a 17″ LCD panel on the wall and see photos in giant glory!

Out of curiosity, I did a quick spin to get a feel for other digital picture frames that are out there. Here are some I spotted:

Meritline 5.6 Inch. Smaller than my frame, but it will also play MP3 files from internal speakers. It’s also fairly cheap at $150. But for only $25 more, you can get the 8 inch version or there’s a 7 inch widescreen. Of course, no idea if the picture quality is any good. Engadget has a very short review here.

Pacific Digital MV800. Link is to the 8″ version, which currently runs you $230. Like the Meritline, it will do sound and pictures. It also has a wood surround, as opposed to my Philips which has a clear plastic one (which I don’t mind, but others might it plasticky). Resolution is 640×480, while my frame is 720×480 — so I might have slightly better quality images (or perhaps just slightly more display space. I’m not really up on screen resolutions as they apply to digital frames!). Pacific Digital has a number of other frames too, as listed here, including one that gets pictures through your wireless network. CNET has a review of one of the frames here.

Displaying Pictures in Digital Picture Frames from ShortCourses is a really nice tutorial and guide to digital picture frames, listing a variety of models and things to consider when buying. Amazon has a nice selection that you’ll find here, as does Target over here.

Back to my frame. There’s a wood-like version out now, CNET does a review of it here, as does Engadget here with lots of photos. And yes, it does sell in the US for those who don’t want to hassle with a UK plug. You can even get them in Home Depots, it seems. Over in the UK, PC World’s taken them back up to £130. Finally, here’s a nice video that shows how it works, including some of the display effects

The Nintendo DS Lite came to the UK this week. I’d been thinking about getting one for myself, rather than borrowing one of the kids’ DS Nintendos as I’ve been doing recently. Normally, I wait for a trip back to the US to buy items like this, as they’re often a little cheaper. But the prices were good — £100 (about $185) versus around $145 or so with tax in the US, from what I can see. So I went for it here today and was immediately pleased with the decision.

I won’t go into depth about the whole size and weight thing. There are plenty of reviews out there covering this stuff and this great screencast I saw a month or so ago. Instead, I’m going to touch on some general impressions, especially as a parent considering these for the kids.

The DS Lite is much smaller and lighter than a regular Nintendo DS. When I play a game, I’m often sneaking one in before going to sleep. So I’m holding the DS above me and looking up, which gets tiring. Immediately, I could feel holding the DS Lite was much easier.

Thinking like a daddy, I’ve also realized this means less weight to be trucking around in my backpack. Two boys, each with their own DS, that’s me carrying them in my pack to places like when getting our haircut, to football practice and so on. Hmm, maybe upgrading their DSes would be good for me. More on that in a bit….

The screen is excellent, in terms of the better brightness. I’ve been playing Trauma Center: Under The Knife (great game, separate post on that in the future) for the past two weeks or so. I’ve been stuck on one operation. I can’t say that seeing things more clearly alone is the reason is why I finally got past it today. But it did help.

The longer stylus is also great. My hand keeps cramping up with the old stylus, to the point that I dug out a longer stylus from an old Palm I had to use instead. No need with the DS Lite.

As I said, I went in to get a DS Lite for myself. I also have a PSP, and I’ve written how for the kids, I’ve found the DS to be better (see Sony PSP Vs. Nintendo DS: A Parent’s Perspective). But now almost a year after owning a PSP, I’ve made the shift myself to the DS being the better gaming platform.

OK, as I’ve written, I’m not a big shoot-em-up game fan, nor a racing game fan, nor a sports game fan. And that pretty much covers what seems to be 95 percent of the games for the PSP.

Over New Year’s, I did have a great week getting through The Sims 2 on the PSP. I really enjoyed that, despite the pig-slow load and save times and the occasional crashes. Of course, I think The Sims 2 was out on the DS well before it came to the PS plus would have been easier to play with a touchscreen.

I’ve also enjoyed playing Star Wars: Battlezone 2 on occasions over the past few months (put people in the Star Wars universe, and suddenly a shoot-em-up sounds fun!).

That’s pretty much it. Detlev Johnson was trying to get me into some Lord Of The Rings multiplayer game that sounded cool, but I really want some strategy game I can play on my own.

Meanwhile, after seeing the Trauma Centre commercials on TV constantly (hey, branding works!), I decided to get it on a trip to the US recently. I remember years and years ago loving playing a similar game on the Mac. So when I can grab a little time here and there, I play.

Chris Raimondi also gave me a copy of Brain Age at our SES London show (thanks, Chris!), which I’ve been doing at least once every week (UK users — buy yours here or learn to say things in a US accent. The US version doesn’t respond to my wife unless she does that). So that’s been another reason I’ve been grabbing a DS from the kids more and wanting my own.

A new Ages Of Empire is about to come out — there’s Zoo Tycoon that’s also of interest to me, more reason to go DS. Plus, I’ve already got Animal Crossing: Wild World, supposedly for the kids but something I like playing at. And as I’ve written, the Atari Retro pack with Missile Command still rocks. Color me a DSer!

I still wish the screens were bigger and that the DS had some of the multimedia capabilites of the PSP. But I don’t use the PSP much for that anyway. In the end, I guess I’ve given up on the PSP as a gaming platform for me. Sorry, Sony — you had your chance but Nintendo rocks.

While I went to get a DS for myself, tomorrow I’m pretty likely to get them for the boys, as well. Why? The unexpected trade-in offer. Game is giving £40 credit, while Gamestation is giving £45. Plus, Gamestation gives you a free game (any game) with your purchase. So that’s £100 – £45 credit – £20 for the typical cost of a game and it’s £35 effectively for an entirely new unit, one that’s lighter, with a fresh battery, that hasn’t had two years of knocking about, with clean screens before I realized how important screen protectors were for heavy handed kids. I was sold.

Downsides? I am a bit concerned that maybe the DS is too small for little hands. That sounds odd — small should be better for little hands. But little kids are clumbsy, so having something larger to grip on might be better. But they seem OK with mine so far, when I actually let them touch it, that is

Also, after buying two different cases that never worked, I finally found the perfect case for kids and the Nintendo DS at Game. I don’t see it on their web site now, but Lik-Sang carries the case for anyone who wants to order from them.

The protector is cheap — like $7. It clips on easily to the Nintendo DS and stays on. It doesn’t slip off. It doesn’t cover any of the buttons or screens, like some protectors do. But everything external has a nice shell of plastic to protect against drops. Plus, the bottom of the protector has nice shaped ridges that make it easy to hold on to. Once I put my kids’ Nintendo DSes into these, I stopped worrying about them getting broken.

It took forever for a decent case like this for the Nintendo DS to come out. I didn’t want to go back to square one with the DS Lite. But checking Lik-Sang today, they have similar cases for the DS Lite. Phew.

By the way, I also found the perfect game case. Originally, I went for an official Nintendo DS case, which has room to hold some of the games in a pocket. But it’s not a zip pocket, so the games were always falling out. In addition, the case itself didn’t provide protection for the DS when taken out of the case.

Instead, I came across a game wallet at Game. I’ve got two now. Originally, there was one to hold a few DS games and more space for Gameboy Advance ones. Then a new version came out with more room devoted to the DS. I still see that in the stores, while online, this version looks like it will give even more room to DS games. The wallet opens into three sections and holds the games fairly securely when open. Just never put a DS game into one of the plastic slots that have already held an GBA game, because it will have stretched to much to hold it tightly. When closed, nothing falls out. The kids are under strict instructions that all games go from the Nintendos and into the wallet. And sometimes, they even do this Eventually, I’m sure someone will come up with a case absolutely guarantees none of the games will get lost. Until then, Game has the best I’ve found.

A plus — and minus — is that the Lite uses a mini-USB plug for charging. Wow! This is great in that it’s one less power adaptor I have to worry about. I love that USB is slowly becoming a standard charging means for some many things. I should be able to charge it off my laptop or using my iPod, phone, Dell Axim or any of the chargers I have that take a regular USB port into them. On the other hand, I’ve got to dig out and find if I have a car USB charger, because the old Nintendo DS car charger I have will no longer work. I’m sure I’ve got one somewhere. If not, they’re pretty cheap.

(Postscript: As it turns out, while it looks like a mini-USB socket, none of my mini-USB plugs will fit into it. Annoying.)

Surprisingly, the Lite doesn’t come with a wriststrap. I find it useful to have one, but I don’t know if the kids use them much. There is a connection for a wriststrap, if you buy one separately. Need some? Again, Lik-Sang’s got some (what don’t they have!).

A slight downside is that GBA games, while still accepted, stick out of the case a little bit. They’re still in pretty far and secure. There’s no real chance you’d accidentally break one off. I like that they were so flush with the old ones and love that it effectively means you have two games available to the kids without them having to seek out the game wallet, which I don’t always take with me. Would have been nice if they could have been flush in the Lite, but even better might have been the ability for the DS Lite to hold two different DS games (or a bigger screen, or to take an SD card, or…)

That’s about it so far. Well, one last thing. Back to the cases, I may end up getting one for myself. Pdair makes leather ones in various colors, like this one in white or this one in black from a UK supplier. I like that the case is thin yet still has room to hold three DS games.

It’s been about two weeks since I’ve gotten Sky HD. I wasn’t super thrilled with the picture quality at first, but I’ve since been fully converted.

When people in the US would talk about HD, it sounded miraculous. In part, I think that’s because the NTSC standard is lower quality than PAL (see PAL vs NTSC). So for them, the jump from 480 lines to 720 or 1080 was more dramatic than me jumping from the 525 lines of PAL.

Still, my Sky box should be showing me twice the lines of ordinary PAL. Why wasn’t I more impressed initially? I think because it was easy to forget how “bad” old PAL was.

Two things have changed that for me recently. The first was the World Cup. I’ve watched a couple of matches in HD via the BBC, but the last two were on ITV, which isn’t doing HD broadcasts. They were awful. As players moved across the field, they had terrible ghosting around them, MPEG artifacts or blurs that were entirely absent in the HD broadcasts.

The second was having to watch our old television after the Sky HD box oddly decided it wouldn’t record some channels. It would tell you the channel was being recorded on the info bar, but if you went into Sky Planner, nothing was showing as recorded there. A soft reboot — turn the power off, take out the viewing card, turn the power on, then reinsert the viewing card after the system said no viewing card inserted — solved that problem.

Our old TV has our old Sky+ box merrily recording things that were on series link. So we caught up with the last two episode of Desperate Housewives in standard definition. Throughout the program, I kept noticing how I could see the TV scan lines. In the past, the individual lines of the CRT never were that noticeable. But after two weeks of HD, they’re glaring.

A further decent into geekdom, a post about my new shredder. But hey, I love to research purchases almost as much as making them.

I’ve had a little shredder for years, a Rexel V15S. It’s sat under my desk and diligently munched up my top secret documents. Well, old bank statements and other stuff you really shouldn’t throw in the trash.

I’ve only had two issues with it. First, I could never tell when it was full — and it always seemed to fill fast. When it was full, emptying it was a hassle. You have to take the heavy shredder unit off the top, which inevitably sent little shredded pieces of paper on the floor. Then I’d have to remember where the Dustbuster was, and … yeah, who knew emptying a shredder could be so tough?

Soon after we moved, I popped into the local Staples and saw the nirvana of shredders, the Fellowes DS-1.

Seriously, I felt as if it was illuminated by a golden light, pulling me toward it as soon as I walked through the doors.

This looked like no ordinary shredder. This was different. It stood tall, proud. It had a bin where you could easily see how full it was, as if such a huge bin would ever get full! And if it did, no lifting the shredder head with this baby. Instead, the bin just slipped out. And what’s this? “Safe Sense” technology to tell if little fingers are anywhere near the cutters? Why what type of a parent would I be if I continued to use some old non-Safe Sense machine! If that wasn’t all, since when could shredders deal with staples and paper clips? This one could!

I held off. No purchase can be confidently made until I’ve done some web research. Staples turned out to have the best price around. How secure was the cutting. I found a nice guide to DIN levels here, though it was no use since the Fellowes product page only said it was “confetti cut.” More digging, and then I turned up this comparison chart via the UK site. DIN3 — confidential quality. That might not cut it (hehe) for government work, but it was plenty safe for me.

Next time into town, I grabbed one. Then, despair. First, despite being rated at handling 11 sheets, I was lucky if 3 or 4 would go through without jamming. But this later stopped. I think the issue was I had a bunch of old documents I was shredding that used to be in our attic, and I think they’d absorbed water over time, making them hard to shred. Soon, it was merrily chomping through multiple documents without hesitation.

Unfortunately, it was too tall. I’d measured before buying and knew it would fit under my desk. It did, barely. But that left little room to actually feed a document into it. I kept having to pull it out from under my desk. And while it was a pretty shredder, it wasn’t something I wanted to make a feature in my office. It had to go.

Staples was totally cool. Sure, bring it back or a refund or exchange. Before I went, I sought out other models, but nothing seemed a good choice. But then at the store, the manager led me through some other options, after hearing what I wanted. And there it was, the Fellowes Powershred PS-62C.

This one was about half the height of the DS-1 and cuts to the same DIN level. No Safe Sense technology, but you can’t get a finger through the top anyway. There’s a clear area on the front, so I can see how full it is. So what — many shredders have that. OK, but it also has a pull out drawer. It was the only shredder not requiring me to lift the cutting head off. That sold me on it.

It’s slower than the DS-1, but not annoyingly slow. It also takes fewer pages, but again, that’s not been a problem. It’s merrily chomping away, plus it takes up little space and hides neatly under my desk. Why, I think I’ll shred something now