Mountebank Blog

I finally found a reason to need USB 2.0. I was trying to transfer a movie (made with Pocket DVD Studio–watch out for the automatic Star Wars movie on their website!) to my SD card so I could watch it on my Palm. I put the card in the USB card reader, dragged and dropped, and again and again I got “device error” or “device not ready” after about three minutes of copying. These were big files, about 200 MB, and I had never had problems using this card reader for smaller files.

I began to be suspicious. Tried transferring the same file to the card using the built-in card reader on my laptop (which is USB 2), and it worked perfectly the first time. It seemed the transfer was just going too slow over my poor sluggish little USB 1.0 connection on the desktop computer, so it was timing out, or something.

Quick check to newegg, and a combo USB 2.0/Firewire PCI card is only about $20 (I couldn’t get a USB only card–had to replace my firewire card, because I didn’t have a PCI slot to spare!). Popped that one in, and voila! Not only will my movies go successfully over to my SD card–they’ll go in only about 2 minutes, instead of six minutes.

Now I just need to sell off my old Belkin Firewire card, and rent and rip me some DVD’s for my next plane ride!

Everybody in the world probably knows that Google has purchased Picasa, and made it available for free. The march of Google continues. In this case, I have some real knowledge of the implications, because I’ve been using Picasa for over a year, and it’s a really nice program. In fact, it beats Adobe Photoshop Album (the closest competitor) hands down. I actually paid for Picasa, I liked it so much, and I bought Photoshop Album, too. When my hard drive died, though, I re-installed Picasa almost immediately, and Photoshop Album never made the move. Gmail, Picasa, what will Google give us for free next? I think Adobe is going to be losing a bit of income, this time! Now the only question is, can I get a refund from Picasa, since it’s free now? 🙂

Since I’ve been reading so many ebooks on my Palm Tungsten T, I really wanted to take it on vacation. So I loaded it up with a couple of books, and some Audible recordings of Science Friday. But I was worried about the batteries–they’re notoriously short-lived on the Tungsten T. I had a AA-powered “emergency charger” that I bought on Ebay, but if the batteries in there aren’t absolutely fresh, it just draws the charge down! So I bought one of these nifty retractible Zip-Linq sync and charge cables on Tiger Direct–thinking I could just plug in to my laptop’s USB, or even the car adaptor (sitting in the glove compartment). I tried it first in the hotel room in Groton, left it plugged in to my laptop overnight, and in the morning it was only at about 85% charged. That’s funny, I thought. But I stopped thinking it was funny as I watched the charge drop literally before my eyes from 85% down to about 6% (less than where it was when I had plugged it in).

I couldn’t figure it out–I thought it might be because my laptop’s USB port was unpowered–but it had charged my cellphone successfully. I thought it might be because I was charging the cellphone at the same time, but a second test ruled that out. Luckily, at the last minute, I had thrown the AA emergency charger into my bag, so I was able to survive. I finally did some webchecking, and discovered that there are two ziplinq chargers for Palms with universal connectors, an A and a B. The one Tiger Direct had sold me, even though their website claimed it was compatible with the Tungsten T, was actually an A which is not compatible with my Palm. Ziplinq’s website makes this clear. Tiger does not. Did a little more searching and finally, happily, found that Cables4Computer.com is one of the only places to carry the B cable I needed. And now I’m charged, charging, chargable.