September 2006 Archives

As you probably guessed from my last post, I got a Sansa e260 music player the other day. Here are my thoughts.

• Size is just fine. I don't think smaller would do any good.
• The screen is pretty nice in spite of its small size. I get a freaky stereoscopic effect when looking at it, though, which goes away if I close one eye.
• You have to set the clock yourself. Why can't it do this automatically during a sync?
• An alarm clock would have been nice, until you remember there's no speaker.
• The media converter software sucks. The video is actually sort of OK, but landscape pictures always get rotated to portrait orientation on the portrait screen, which means they're very small with two big black bands on the top and bottom. Silly. I'd rather have to turn the player sideways than lose so much resolution on an already small screen.
• I have to play a song to add it to the "Go List," which is the only playlist you can edit on the device. This means the Go List is useless as a jukebox-style list. I'd like to be able to listen to music and queue up more songs as I browse, but the Sansa won't let you do that. Edit #2 9/27/2006: Close but no cigar, SanDisk. A tip on an online bulletin board suggested a way to add music to the Go List while playing other songs. This seems like the feature I wanted, but it's fatally flawed. If you add to the Go List while simultaneously playing it, the Sansa fails to re-read the list -- it plays the Go List contents as of the moment you originally started it! In order to hear the music you added, you have to restart play of the Go List. Very non-jukebox-like. My criticism stands.
• The buttons are too hard to press. They're too small and the wheel gets in the way.
• The proprietary connector makes me angry. Every other applicable consumer device I own works with a mini-USB plug.
• The proprietary connector is especially annoying because none of the e200 accessories that plug into it are available yet. And how about a second USB cable so you can sync at work and at home? Forget about it.
• The volume resets to 50% every time you power off the device. Maybe they were trying to limit flash writes for this oft-changed setting. But wow, what a price to pay.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with it. It sounds good, it's small, and the battery life is apparently infinite -- or at least longer than I've gone between charging it.

Updated 10/1/2006 to remove link to site that apparently has moronic editorial policy.

This is how to put playlists on the Sansa e260 MP3 player (part of the e200 series) using an application other than Windows Media Player, such as Winamp, without having to switch from MTP to the less convenient MSC mode. I won't go into the reasons why you'd want to do this; if you've ever used WMP, the reasons are plain as day.

Some background why these instructions are even necessary: the e260 seems to have a bug with playlists. You can add .pla files to \PLAYLISTS, but no matter how correctly you've formatted them, they won't show up in the Sansa UI. The device seems to need a kick in the head to tell it to re-read the files in \PLAYLISTS. These instructions tell you how to conveniently deliver that kick.

Note that my e260 has firmware 01.01.11A, and these instructions work with Winamp 5.24 full version (full is the free version that supports WMA).

First, start up Winamp and add your songs to its library. You've probably already done this.

Next, create a playlist. Call it "Exercise" for this example. Drag a few songs from your library to it.

Next, connect your e260 in MTP mode. It should show up after a few seconds under the "Portables" item in the Winamp hierarchy. Right-click the Exercise playlist and send to your e260. Wait for the playlist and songs to sync, then disconnect your device.

(Optional) go to your e260's playlists and confirm that Exercise didn't show up. If you do see it, then you probably have a future version of the firmware that doesn't have this problem.

Here's the kick. Turn the e260 off by holding down the power button for a couple seconds until you see "GOODBYE." Release the power button. Switch the lock slider to the locked position. Press the power button and keep holding it down. The blue wheel light will come on, and then you'll see the SanDisk logo. Then the screen will go black and you'll see

Key LOCKED
System shutdown

Once you see that message, you can let go of the power button. Flip the lock slider to the unlocked position and press the power button again. Now navigate back to your playlists and you should see Exercise!

Fortunately you don't have to go through these hoops with every sync. You can freely edit existing playlists and add/remove music; these actions appear to work fine. This hack is necessary only to get new playlists to show up.

SanDisk, please fix this bug!

Bruce Schneier finally impelled me to take care of a task on my to-do list: Get passports for everyone in my family. This is a supremely annoying ordeal in terms of paperwork; you need a certified copy of your birth certificate (which to obtain these days in California actually requires a notarized affidavit, thanks to identity thieves and teens making fake IDs) and a fair amount of information about your parents that you may have forgotten or never known.

But the part that used to require the most legwork -- getting two 2-inch square photographs of yourself -- has gotten quite a bit easier in recent years. Here's how to do it.

First, get a digital camera and have someone take your picture. Stand in front of a white wall during the day, and use a flash so it's very well-lit. Heck, while you're there, take 20 pictures so you can pick the one you like.

Second, import your favorite into Picasa. Warmify. Apply the "I'm feeling lucky" auto-correction. Remove red-eye if necessary. Erase blemishes. Save a copy of the resulting photo.

Third, upload the photo to ePassportPhoto and fiddle around with the cropping until you get something that matches the State Department requirements. The cropping tool has a silhouette that makes this pretty easy (though I wish you could drag the crop square after sizing it). When you're done you'll get a link to download a JPEG to your desktop. This picture will have six copies of your cropped portrait in a two-by-three matrix.

Fourth, upload into Snapfish. Order a 4x6 photo. Now, notice that you can have the photo printed at a local Walgreens, and that it will be ready in less than an hour! (Or have it mailed to your house if you're not in a hurry.)

Fifth, get out some scissors, and you're finished!

Now that I write it up, I see that perhaps this method is no easier than having the pictures taken at a place that does them for you. But you do get tremendous control over the final result; no more half-asleep portraits haunting you every time you travel for the next decade.

(Updated to swap steps 2 & 3)

Every so often I read organization tips on the web that seem ridiculously simple ("Keep a to do list." "Use Post-It notes."), but when I follow them, they turn out surprisingly useful. I won't claim that the following tip rises to that level, but it worked for me.

Over the past two weeks I sold two of my family's cars (a Honda Civic and a Honda Pilot) on Craigslist. This meant I got lots of calls from strangers all over the Bay Area. Many identified themselves by first name only, and in any event I didn't really care what their last names were.

For leads that sounded promising, I saved phone numbers in my cell phone using nicknames like "Pilot Lisa" or "Civic John." This is better than just "Lisa" for a couple reasons. When I get calls from Lisa and the caller ID pops up with the name, I know not just who it is, but why she's calling -- better than "who the heck is Lisa?" Plus, when the transaction is complete, I can run through all the "Pilot" and "Civic" names, which are sorted alphabetically in my address book, and delete them.

This is a nice way to manage temporary contacts related to a short-lived project.

HDMI cables are very, very, very expensive at your local electronics retailer. I've discussed this before, but have found a way around it for 6-foot HDMI cables.

At the moment, Best Buy is selling 4-foot HDMI cables for $149.99 (search for SKU 7129029). Oppo sells its highly rated DV-970HD DVD player for $149.00, and includes a six-foot, 24 AWG (not 26!), gold-plated HDMI cable with it.

So you can pay $149.99 to Best Buy and get a four-foot cable, or pay $149.00 to Oppo and get a six-foot cable. Oh, and Oppo throws in a DVD player for free.