He was on his hands and knees for hours helping me pull carpet staples out of my soaking wet basement floor yesterday, and once tore my car door apart and repaired my power window perfectly without new parts IN MY DRIVEWAY.

Thanks to him I am all set with my post-storm repairs, but I know alot of people could use his help right now, so PLEASE don’t hesitate to send me an email at the contact form and I will hook you up.

Originally appeared on: StationStops - Metro-North Train Schedules and NYC Commuting Blog See the original post here: My Greenwich/Stamford Handyman/Mechanic Kicks Ass, Has Availability Now

The Apple iPad wifi-only version will be launched on April 3, 2010, according to the official iPad press release distributed this morning by Apple. The 3G/Wifi version will ship ‘in late April’.

Users can pre-order the iPad starting March 13th.

via Gizmodo

Originally appeared on: StationStops - Metro-North Train Schedules and NYC Commuting Blog See the original post here: Apple iPad Official Launch Date April 3, Preorders March 13

Roosevelt, a 57-year-old legless amputee, was identified on surveillance footage being wheeled into the station by another man on Thursday morning. Roosevelt was then seen leaving a Steve Madden bag containing a canvas laptop bag with the explosive device.

Various reports include M-80 fireworks, shotgun shells, lug nuts, wires, paper, pens, bullets, and a computer as among the items found in the bag. The device did not include a timer but could have exploded it lit, said police. Some have suggested the incident may have been a ‘dry run’ to observe response.

Vosizneias.com reports law enforcement officials as saying the suspect has past drug offenses and told police a woman gave him the bag.

Police were reported as not identifying terrorism as a motive but the incident remains under investigation.

Two MTA patrol officers discovered the bag at around 11 AM. The station was evacuated and trains rerouted, affecting service until 2 PM.

Roosevelt and the man accompanying him were later arrested. Some reports identify a third man who accompanied the pair still being sought by police.

1010 Wins reported that Roosevelt is now under observation at Bellevue Hospital Center.

MTA Press Spokesman Aaron Donovan told StationStops on Saturday that the surveillance footage had not been released and that there was no mugshot available of the suspect, who is awaiting bedside arraignment at Bellevue.

Originally appeared on: StationStops - Metro-North Train Schedules and NYC Commuting Blog See the original post here: Man Leaves Bomb at Harlem 125th St Metro-North Station

There are tons of great little appliances taking advantage of the fantastic miniaturization and HD video capabilities of the Intel Atom platform and its competitors – specifically, NAS appliances like the Synology Diskstation and HD media centers like the Western Digital Live HD and Asus O!Play.

For those of you, like me, who have tried to build media centers using Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms in the past, you know it sounds a lot better in theory then in practice.

There are a lot of tough details to work out so that your media center is more of a transparent pleasure in your entertainment center, and less of a klutzy hassle.

1. Form Factor.

You want it to look nice next to your other components. The last thing you want is a beige box in your living room.

2. Silence.

It shouldn’t make any noise, whether its busy or not. Nothing detracts from a superb but quiet moment in a Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound blockbuster then the scratching of a read head from a hard drive, or the sudden enabling of a fan.

3. Connectivity.

Ideally, its nice to have Ethernet, wireless, component, composite, and HDMI available , plus USB ports for external storage and an IR port for a remote.

4. Power.

It shouldn’t use much. A regular desktop PC can easily suck 200-250 watts. Appliances like the WD Live HD use about 10 watts!.

5. 10-ft Interface.

This is the toughest part of all, because while their are HTPC apps like Boxee which work fine while you are inside Boxee, if you want to switch to another app or if it crashes (which Boxee is want to do), you are stuck with a desktop and a remote. Plus, if you want to move between apps, like between Boxee and EyeTV, things get a little tougher.

6. Efficient design.

My Synology NAS does more things than I ever thought a NAS could do, and it does it in 128MB of RAM. That’s because the software and firmware are carefully designed known quantities. It’s extremely difficult for DIY’ers to get the same results from similar hardware.

7. Support.

I don’t mean calling a support line. I mean, one day your firmware in your media center pops up and offers to download a new version automatically and solve problems and add features very specific to its usability as a media center. Plus, being able to hang out on forums with other users with the same hardware and software as you makes debugging much easier.

8. Your Family.

OK, so you are a tech-head who actually gets excited about tweaking a home media center and doesn’t mind a bit about pulling out a keyboard to fix stuff. Guess what? Your wife hates that, and so does everyone else in your family.

All of this is incredibly expensive and difficult to get ‘just right’ and stay that way, compared to the lowly $120 of a great product like the Western Digital Live HD.

But there are some drawbacks to the WD Live too. It has no DVD/Blu-ray, TV tuner, DRM, Hulu, Netflix, or DVR capabilities, all of which you could enable with a homebrew setup.

So what CAN the WD Live do? In a nutshell, it allows you to navigate and play a wide variety of audio and video digital formats either locally on a USB drive or over the network to a shared folder or DLNA server, and it does this pretty well. I was surprised at how quickly and comprehensively it automatically found my network resources – it was better at this than my Windows 7 box.

The WD Live HD sports support for Pandora (yay), Flickr, Live365 (meh), and YouTube (which at this point my toaster supports). HD users should be aware that it seems YouTube is dropping support for HD in non-web browser appliances.

It’s a very solid, lightweight and seemingly reliable unit, that responds well to input, boots fast, and will alert you to firmware updates and install them instantly over the air with no fuss at all.

Setup should be straightforward, but for me it wasn’t as slick as I had hoped. Like a lot of HD devices, you need to hook it up to component or composite inputs to get access to the menu to change the settings to HDMI, which really takes out some of the fun and ease of setup promised by HDMI.

I have hooked about 5-6 network devices up to the switch in my entertainment center, and none of them have had problems with DHCP autoconfig. The WD Live did, but I’m not going to get down too much on them for this as to be fair, I have two networks on the switch that most people don’t have to worry about confusing the WD Live HD.

My HDMI cable was only partially inserted, which is always a fun debug. The WD Live HD is so small and light, a stiff HDMI or network cable can move it out of place very easily, which might jar other connections or adjust remote line-of-sight just enough to cause you trouble. Use the included rubber feet.

Once booted, you will find the WD Live HD easy to learn, but unnecessarily cumbersome to move through quickly.

A universal problem with video convergence appliances is that they don’t let you configure your own home menu to show only things you do 99% of the time. Imagine using a web browser without a bookmarks toolbar, Windows without a start menu or quicklaunch, or MacOS with no dock.

Instead, it uses the very predictable and ’safe’ method of providing top-level menus for movies, music, and photos, then you drill down to the network share, USB storage, or online service you want to use, then perhaps folders within. This is made worse by the obligatory fade-in fade-out animations.

Ideally, my media center would start up and read ‘Movies on Diskstation’ ‘Music on Diskstation’ ‘Photos on Diskstation’ and ‘My Pandora Account’ – because those are the only network objects I ever intend to use. It really would be so easy to do, but no one does it.

About the best I could say about this is that there aren’t exactly a Boxee-hodgepodge of (mostly uninteresting) features in the WD Live HD, so its less annoying than Boxee’s drill-downs.

Text input with the remote is about the worst I have seen. I mean, they could have ripped off just about anyone’s technique and it would work better – especially for entering IP addresses – the numbers appear linearly – just using a phone dial layout would be more efficient. Luckily, it gets the job done and it mostly needed only for manual setup and account logins for services like YouTube (which, thankfully, it remembers).

The interface is obviously designed to scale down well and while it is rendered very nicely, does not take advantage of HD resolution to make navigation easier. Having a left-hand menu of bookmarks and recently accessed media with a drilldown or preview window on the right would make it twice as usable instantly.

I am a big fan of having a ‘now playing’ window that PIPs to the corner while you use menus, which Comcast and most other cable provider HD DVRs do. It amazes me that my TiVo HD does not – it just plops the guide down over whatever your watching, or completely leaves the video entirely to navigate menus. This would also be a nice interface feature for the WD HD Live. This is a minor gripe for this type of device however, where there is less need to do ‘other stuff’ while watching.

While we’re on the topic of TiVo HD – one of my favorite inventions of all time, I need to take a moment to punch them in the gut, because they are totally asleep at the switch.

Rather than use popular network sharing features like DLNA, TiVo has always gone with its horrifically slow and unreliable TiVo Desktop software. Although I have never had too much trouble downloading video off my TiVo with it, its rare I ever want to. The real problem is in the opposite direction – watching video files off the Windows box with TiVo. TiVo will ’see’ my Windows box about 99% of the time, but I have probably only been able to get it to see any *media* shared by TiVo Desktop about 1% of the time.

Even if it did work, I have no interest in keeping my 250-watt Windows box up and running 24/7 – that’s why I have a NAS. TiVo Desktop does not support NAS devices.

The support for TiVo Desktop has historically been terrible as well.

The whole point of me bringing this up is that if TiVo would simply get off its butt and support DLNAB, there would really be no reason for me to need the WD Live HD box or change inputs on my TV to switch between TiVo and my digital media. To take it one step further, to have at least *the option* of a TiVo with a built-in DVD or Blu-Ray player would also reduce my need for additional devices and inputs.

When TiVo allowed third parties to make its hardware, Pioneer had an exceptional TiVo model with a built-in DVD *burner*/player, with 480P component out. It was my favorite TiVojust because I could switch between DVDs and DVR instantly with one box, one input, and one remote. How does TiVokeep stepping ‘back’?

To its credit, the inclusion of Amazon On Demand to TiVois an exceptional feature, especially since at this point in time HD Cablecards do not support On-Demand cable services.

I can hear the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 users clamoring ‘but we can do ALL of that!’ and its true – but at the same time, they aren’t HD DVRs either. The XBox 360 only has a DVD player, and the Playstation 3 sucks about as much power as a small refrigerator just to play back an MP3.

If you already own either one of these boxes, you really aren’t going to get much value out of a Western Digital Live HD, except for massive power savings and perhaps file format support (MKV?). I am not sure about Pandora/YouTube on < a type="amzn">XBox/< a type="amzn">PS3, but I know both also have downloadable movies and at least one if not both has Netflix support, neither of which are supported by the Western Digital Live HD.

When browsing DLNA on the Western Digital Live HD, I noticed that all of my DLNA media – photos, images, and video, would appear under each category, but it won’t play, for example, music files if you are drilled down into the video category of the menu. I don’t know if this was my NAS DLNA server not being specific about the content of each category to the media center, or the media center not caring, but it’s annoying and magnifies the fact that you have to ‘drill down’ to access different media types, even if they are on the same server.

Western Digital, being a hard drive maker, really wants you to use this device with an external hard drive. In fact, the setup documentation seems to infer its *required* for setup, ‘but you can turn it off later’. This is completely untrue, you can setup and use the box entirely over your network with no hard drive attached from the get-go.

As far as picture quality goes, no complaints here, playing back big DiVx movies on the Western Digital Live HD was quick and looked nice, fast forwarding working better than average.

Conclusion

The Western Digital Live HD is an exceptionally affordable, tidy, professionally made, and extremely efficient and adorable little device for what it does – but what it does is somewhat limited and while I hear its interface is more professional than its competitors, its not going to win any usability awards for its navigation.

If you have an XBox 360 or PS3, or anything connected to your TV with decent DLNA and file format support, you probably do not need or want a Western Digital Live HD.

But in a world of 55-inch 1500-watt 1080p Plasmas, always-on HD DVRs and 400-watt gaming systems, the little $120, 10-watt (!!) Western Digital Live HD will fill many peoples needs in an adorably affordable and efficient package.

Western Digital Live HD

File Formats Supported

Video – AVI (Xvid, AVC, MPEG1/2/4), MPG/MPEG, VOB, MKV (h.264, x.264, AVC, MPEG1/2/4, VC-1), TS/TP/M2T (MPEG1/2/4, AVC, VC-1), MP4/MOV (MPEG4, h.264), M2TS, WMV9

Photo – JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP, PNG

Audio – MP3, WAV/PCM/LPCM, WMA, AAC, FLAC, MKA, AIF/AIFF, OGG, Dolby Digital, DTS

Playlist – PLS, M3U, WPL

Subtitle – SRT, ASS, SSA, SUB, SMI

Note:

- MPEG2 MP@HL up to 1920×1080p24, 1920×1080i30 or 1280×720p60 resolution.
- MPEG4.2 ASP@L5 up to 1280×720p30 resolution and no support for global motion compensation.
- WMV9/VC-1 MP@HL up to 1280×720p60 or 1920×1080p24 resolution. VC-1 AP@L3 up to 1920×1080i30, 1920×1080p24 or 1280×720p60 resolution.
- H.264 BP@L3 up to 720×480p30 or 720×576p25 resolution.
- H.264 MP@L4.1 and HP@4.1 up to 1920×1080p24, 1920×1080i30, or 1280×720p60 resolution.
- An audio receiver is required for multi-channel surround sound digital output.
- Compressed RGB JPEG formats only and progressive JPEG up to 2048×2048.
- Single layer TIFF files only.
- Uncompressed BMP only.

For details, please refer to the user manual.

File Formats Not Supported
Does not support protected premium content such as movies or music from the iTunes® Store, Cinema Now, Movielink®, Amazon Unbox™, and Vongo®

Connectivity
Interface Ethernet, HDMI, Composite A/V, Component video, USB 2.0

Originally appeared on: StationStops - Metro-North Train Schedules and NYC Commuting Blog See the original post here: Western Digital Live HD Media Player Review [WD Live HD Review]

The Crucial RealSSD C300 comes in 128GB ($499) aand 256GB ($799) models and has been confirmed by third-party websites as being capable of surpassing 350 MB/s read and 200 MB/s write speeds.

HotHardware.com demonstrated that while the C300 can be connected via the SATA II ports common in most user’s current computers and laptops, it’s performance will be capped. In order to get the full performance of the drive, it is necessary to connect it via the new SATA 3.0 6 Gbps controller.

The good news is that if you have a PCI-E x4 expansion slot, you can add a couple of SATA 3.0 ports and 2 USB 3.0 ports to your existing computer in about 60 seconds with a $30 Asus U3S6 PCI-Express SATA 3 6 Gbps / USB 3.0 combo card (warning: Asus only qualifies this card as working with specific Asus motherboards, but I’ve heard others have gotten it working. I just ordered one and will let you know how it turns out. The thing is, this board is not only less expensive than most competing SATA 3 cards, but the inclusion of USB 3.0 doubles its value, especially if you only have one PCI-E x4 or better slot available).

If you don’t have a free PCI-E slot you will probably need a new motherboard for SATA 3, since the PCI-E bus is the only connector your computer has which is capable of providing the bandwidth required.

Crucial has priced the 256GB version of the drive very competitively at $799, pretty much matching the street price for its nearest direct competition, the
OCZ Vertex 250 GB on a price-per-GB basis.

Pricing for the 128GB model is less competitive at $499, putting the cost per GB at nearly $3.89 (vs about $3.12 for the 256 GB version – someone check my math)

As of this writing, the usual suspects – Amazon and NewEgg, did not have a listing for the drive. It will be interesting to see if they discount it at all over the Crucial store.

Originally appeared on: StationStops - Metro-North Train Schedules and NYC Commuting Blog See the original post here: Crucial C300 SATA 3 6 Gbps SSD Now Available On Crucial.com

“Metro-North Spokesperson Dan Brucker said a train that left the Danbury station at 6:19 a.m killed the “trespasser”. The trespasser appears to be a woman, Brucker said.”

From The Republican-American, November 11th, 2005:

“…was the eighth “trespasser death” in 2005 on the Metro-North system, which is made up of the Hudson, Harlem and New Haven lines, Bruckner said. …”

Connecticut Post, April 12, 2008:

“The train struck a trespasser east of Stratford” at 4:40 pm, said Karina Romero, an Amtrak spokeswoman.”

January 12, 2009 Star-Ledger:

A man was struck and killed by an eastbound NJ Transit train at the Linden station late this afternoon, and transit officials are calling it a “trespasser fatality.”

NJ Transit spokesman Dan Stessel said the man had apparently “put himself into the side of the train,”

Listen, MTA, we know that you have rightfully have legal liability concerns with one of your trains striking and killing a human being.

As such, we also understand why you would want to make it abundantly and immediately clear that the victim was not supposed to be where they were at the time. I mean, we ALL know that, and we know how much you want to assert that to the victim’s survivors.

But let’s show a little more respect to the victim, family, and community by not referring to them primarily as ‘trespassers’. Seriously, this is in VERY bad taste, and its not like its purpose or insensitivity is lost on the reader of any paper.

Everytime I hear this, I picture a cartoon of an Old West farmer, standing over the dead body of some chicken thief with a smoking shotgun.

I think I speak for most people when I say its an egregiously offensive piece of CYA.

Not to mention unnecessary. If the victim trespassed, well, she trespassed. If a lawsuit were to arise, that fact would not change one way or the other depending on your press department’s assertion to local papers.

It’s really just a sad Jedi mind trick to dispel any notion of liability in the minds of the victim’s survivors.

Today a woman deliberately ‘trespassed’ on MTA property and laid her body down before a moving train in South Norwalk, much to the horror of witnesses, riders, emergency responders, and the engineer, I am sure.

That woman is a ‘victim’. I know it pains you to characterize her as such, to avoid the unwarranted deduction that she was a victim of MTA. She wasn’t. She was likely a victim of her own actions, and whatever unfortunate circumstances led her to those tracks.

How you choose to characterize that woman in the press release is important.

Granted, you aren’t the only culprit, and its seems pretty much the industry norm to put the trespass status of train accident victims up front. But its still a choice, and its one you continue to make.

Next time, let’s release a statement which primarily reflects on the unfortunate and solemn mood such occasions present, and not let ‘calling shotgun’ on your legal defense define the moment.

PS – As an aside, I don’t want to specifically call out Dan Brucker or any other press spokesman for this behavior, because I am absolutely certain it is in no way their personal preference to use that word, but instead an unfortunate requirement of their employer. I understand that press spokespeople are human beings too.

Originally appeared on: StationStops - Metro-North Train Schedules and NYC Commuting Blog See the original post here: MTA, Other Train Operators Need To Back Off Calling Track Fatality Victims ‘Trespassers’

Unfortunately, some of these technologies are going to be unavailable to most Mac users for some time. Its one of the disadvantages of Mac ’s hardware being tightly controlled and locked down by one company, and the relatively slower approach Apple takes when deciding which new technologies are important and when.

Let’s take a look at some of these technologies, why they matter, and how Mac users – especially buyers of Apple’s latest iMacs – are largely locked out of them due to the lack of desktop expansion options common with PCs. In fact, several new models of PC motherboards are already in the channel which, when combined with Windows 7, include complete support for all of them on-board.

USB 3.0

The most important is USB 3.0 To date, modern hard drives have been severely bottlenecked by Firewire and USB 2.0 as convenient external drive connections. eSATA has been a help, but as many users know, eSATA (if Apple even decided to include such ports) can be fussy and its usually easier to just use USB 2.0.

USB 3.0 is about 10x faster than USB 2.0 in the real world, which really lifts the bottleneck off of common external storage. This is a big help especially for Time Machine users who allow Time Machine to back up their Mac frequently.

But there is another great benefit to USB 3.0 also – and that is the extra electrical power it supplies to devices, which makes it such a better choice for external storage over all other methods.

With USB 3.0, it is possible to connect much more power-hungry external drives without a separate power connector or y-cable. As every computer user knows, the fewer cables the better no matter whether where you are, but mobile users will especially appreciate this.

Now, if your notebook – Mac or otherwise – has an ExpressCard port, you will likely be able to add an awkward adapter to enjoy USB 3.0 down the road – but you will need an external AC adapter to supply the extra power it needs which it cannot draw from the ExpressCard slot.

The problem is, there are a lot of very popular MacBooks without an ExpressCard slot out there (mine is one – a 2008 Unibody MacBook) – and iMac users are sadly completely out of luck, as that machine has no PCI Express expansion.

SATA 3.0 6Gbps

SATA 3.0 6Gbps is less important to the average user, but will be a nice feature for power users very soon. The reason is that this month the new Micron C300 SSD will be released which will be the first – but definitely not the last – to exceed the real-world throughput of SATA II.

Since this performance boost is largely delivered by the drive controller, and not the quality of the Flash memory, it is not unlikely we will see more drives at reasonable (relatively, for SSD) prices over the next 12 months.

Again, if you have an ExpressCard slot you may be able to take advantage of this for external storage – but ironically, not for internal storage. In general, due to their price, most users (like myself) prefer to use SSDs as internal boot drives and traditional drives for external bulk storage.

And while we are on the topic of SSD’s…

High Performance Solid State Disks (SSD’s)

MacBook users are not completely locked out of the great performance advantages of the newer High-Performance Solid State Disks. I am writing this on a MacBook with an OCZ 120 GB Vertex SSD right now, its been in their for 9 months with absolutely tremendous performance and zero issues.

However, unlike Windows 7, MacOS is not ‘aware’ of SSDs and treat them as a normal hard drive. This has some drawbacks.

Most important is the lack of TRIM command support in MacOS, which is supported in Windows 7. The TRIM command enables the OS and SSD to negotiate the management of drive space to avoid specific performance issues with SSDs when they start to become full.

Whats important to remember is that the performance hit from not having TRIM support will vary from drive to drive, and will reach a certain point after which it wont get any worse. I have read few anecdotes from people who have observed such a hit that they sold their SSD. I personally have never really observed it on my MacBook, but I have never come close to filling the drive either.

My Windows 7 SSD *is* nearly full, and I haven’t perceived any issue with that drives performance either.

(This is potentially relevant however since most SSD’s are 120 GB or less and are very expensive. As a result, users tend to buy as little storage as they can tolerate, and as a result will typically fill it faster than a $75 1TB Hard Drive.)

Windows 7 will also make other adjustments in how it manages an SSD which involve the disabling of features which were only designed to overcome the performance profiles of a traditional hard disk which are not present on an SSD.

For example, an SSD does not need to be defragmented (and shouldn’t be since you want to avoid unnecessary writes). Other features such as Superfetch, boot and application launch prefetching, ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive – which are designed to overcome the access time variance with hard drives – are also unnecessary.

These steps are also important to the lifetime of the SSD, since fewer writes = longer SSD lifetime. (In the real world, however, SSD cell write wear is not going to be a problem for most users – and modern SSD controllers can reduce it’s likelihood enormously with wear leveling and write amplification reduction algorithms)

Note: Intel claims that the average user writes about 2-3 GB of data to their hard drive every day, and that in order to wear out an Intel SSD, you would need to write about 100 GB day for the drive to wear out over 5 years. Extrapolating, this means it is more likely you will die before you drive suffers a write-wear failure. So, although SSD cells do in fact have a limited write capacity, its relevance is largely mythical. Compared to the reliability of a mechanical drive, its nearly hysterical.

Finally, Windows 7 will avoid the unnecessary use of unused disk space, properly align the NTFS partitions, eliminate merge operations and prioritize garbage collection (PDF of relevant PPT Presentation).

So, Windows 7 users are going to get better performance and better reliability out of SSDs compared to other OS’s. It really is entirely up to Apple to start taking similar steps.

iMac and Mac Mini users have a special problem with SSDs however, and that is that neither allows the user to (easily) replace the hard drive themselves. I certainly would not recommend any user not familiar with building their own computer crack open their Mac Mini with a Spackle knife, or attempt the challenging and delicate disassembly and thermal sensor handling required to simply change the hard drive in a 27″ iMac.

Also, there is only one drive bay in most Macs, so the preferred desktop strategy of having an SSD boot drive and an HDD mass storage drive onboard is impossible (another reason the iMac would benefit from USB 3.0 – the HDD could be external without the performance penalty).

In Conclusion

Mac users seeking to upgrade should be aware of these new technologies and decide for themselves which are important to them over the lifetime of their next Mac purchase.

Unfortunately, unlike other computer manufacturers and OS’s, Apple keeps its roadmaps under its hat, making an upgrade decision frustratingly difficult compared to PC users. Which makes it the same old game of wait-and-see.

Originally appeared on: StationStops - Metro-North Train Schedules and NYC Commuting Blog See the original post here: Apple Mac Users Locked Out of USB 3.0, SATA 3.0 6Gbps, and SSD Support