Category: Reviews

Review: Kobo Wifi

A little while back I picked up a Kobo Wifi e-Reader for $40 +tax with free shipping thanks to RedFlagDeals. I really didn’t need yet another gadget, but at this price point it was far too tempting. The Kobo refurbished page is still up, but lists as out of stock currently.

The device came with version 1.7 of the firmware installed, as soon as I connected it to my wifi network it found an update to 1.9. I stalled on doing the update as I wanted to experience it in the out of the box state for a bit. Initially I’d say I felt it was hard on the battery, no where near the 2 weeks / 10,000 page turns per charge they claim. I also noticed it was waking itself up from sleep mode regularly.

Updating the firmware over wifi was easy, once you struggled past the painful text entry of your wifi network password. Moving to 1.9 I noticed an improved wifi indicator along with the expected improvements. It was still waking itself up which turned out to be a simple matter of fixing the setting: Menu > Settings > General, and change the “Download Daily” flag to ‘No’. Battery life appears to be improving as I use the device, I can now get through several hundred pages across multiple days on a single charge, I suspect the refurbished unit still has the original battery.

The screen is really quite amazing, quite comparable to reading a printed page. Lacking a light is a bit of a bummer for me as I tend to read in bed, but I’ve got a flashlight app on my phone that I often use for reading in the dark. Comparing this e-Reader to a book is more accurate than trying to compare it to a tablet, it is very much a single purpose device. The screen size is roughly paperback sized (6″ diagonal) and while the device itself has a generous border it’s still easy to hold in one hand (7.2″ x 4.7″). There are a few font choices and sizes, I find medium to work well for me in contrast to other readers where I’ve tended to pick smaller than average font sizes. The flip-side of this may be that for people who want very large print, this may not go big enough.

I was particularly impressed with the weight. The specification page claims 221g (7.8oz), I weighed mine and it came in at only 196g. Compare this to my Samsung Galaxy S phone at 118g, or the iPad 2 at 600g. Having a nice light reading device makes it easier to have long reading sessions.

I’ve also used the Kobo app on Android, the reading experience is quite different. Additionally the app version appears to have features that the Kobo Wifi does not, this isn’t a deal breaker but it seems odd that they didn’t try to incorporate the Reading Life features in, or at minimum contribute to the statistics of books read, etc. (The Kobo Touch does have Reading Life) One thing the Kobo Wifi supports that the app doesn’t is PDF files, again odd they didn’t aim to provide a seamless experience across readers. One other gripe I have about the software is that while it supports both date and time, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to get the time while reading – I really wish they had made it visible on the menu.

The E-Ink screen is a bit slow to refresh, it takes a bit longer than the time it takes to move your eyes from the bottom of the page to the top to start reading again. I’m a fairly fast reader so it may be more noticeable to me, but it isn’t so slow that I won’t use it to read.

I do find the choice of button layout to be poor. Pictured above is my primary method of holding it. I really wish they had put page turn buttons on the side of the device (when I read on my phone, I use the volume up/down buttons for page turning and find this much more convenient). The four buttons on the side seem poorly thought out too, I’ll point out that I’d never used the back button until just now and it didn’t do what I expected.

You can use the shop button (once you’ve configured your wifi network) to synchronize your Kobo library or purchase books. Adding books manually is simple: plug the Kobo Wifi into your PC using the mini-USB cable, you’ll be given a choice to manage library or just keep reading (while charging). Choose mange library and it will appears as a USB drive, now drag and drop stuff. A nice feature is the USB drive contains the Windows/Mac software you can use to manage the books on the device. As I mentioned previously, PDF files are supported when added manually.

In general eBooks don’t take up a lot of space, so the internal memory will be plenty for most. Those that want to have a lot of books on hand can add a SDCard for additional storage.

Overall I’m quite pleased with the value for money. It may be a little dated, and missing some of the newer features but it does let you read eBooks in full sunlight or any well lit room.

Review: OCZ Vertex 3 120G SSD

I’m not entirely certain which event triggered my gear lust for a solid state drive (SSD), it was probably a mix of Jeff Atwood’s post, TechReport’s storage section, and the falling prices resulting in smaller SSDs down below the $100 price point. Whatever it was, I couldn’t really shake the idea of having a SSD in my work laptop – so I decided to get one.

Initially I had thought that a 60G-64G drive would fit the bill, being under the $100 price point and just big enough to hold the OS plus my Lotus Notes mail installation. After reviewing benchmarks, and reviews I decided to focus on the 120G size – in part due to a general recommendation that the 60G size is a bit small for most, and the benchmark numbers on the 120G are a bit better. The price was higher, but still within a very reasonable budget as SSDs are approaching $1 a Gig. The TechReport comparison of 120G-128G size helped me narrow my choice down to the OCZ Vertex 3.

While the Vertex 3 has been on the market a year, it still ranks as one of the fastest drives available. There were some issues with the SandForce SF-2881 controller, but firmware 2.15 is reported to be solid.

My laptop was running a 500G SATA2 Toshiba drive, configured as a single large partition running Windows 7. I had no interest in re-installing from scratch so my approach was to clone the working system onto the smaller drive. There are likely plenty of ways to do this, I was able to easily find a blog post describing how to do it – I roughly followed those steps but will document exactly what I did here.

Step 1) Reduce the partition on the big hard drive to be a bit less than the formatted capacity of the SSD. Initially after reading a bit I was hesitant to use GParted to do this as it seemed some folks had had problems with Windows 7 and GParted. Windows 7 also has a built in partition resize capability.

I ran into several issues trying to use the built in Windows 7 functionality. First up was some unmovable files causing issues. Even after turning off virtual memory and system restore, I still had issues. The Event Viewer was a help in identifying Chrome as holding onto some unmovable files, then I hit what I believe was an issue with NTFS Metafiles being unmovable and blocking my ability to shrink the partition smaller than 245G. At this point I threw my hands in the air and ran GParted from an Ubuntu Live USB key.

GParted ran to completion, but oddly gave me an error indicating something was wrong – but I couldn’t spot anything actually wrong. [Normally GParted should not give an error] The damage was done so I just rebooted and let Windows perform the necessary chkdsk activity. Things were fine, so either I mis-read that there was an error or it was something that was recoverable. Either way I was now happily running with a 100G partition.

Step 2) Use Clonezilla‘s “savepart” option to capture an image of the partition. Since I had a 500G drive which now had lots of empty space after the 100G system partition, I created a 2nd volume to store the captured image to. You can use a second USB mounted drive, or any number of other options including ssh with Clonezilla to store your image.

I will comment that Clonezilla is not for the timid, the user interface appear very complex and requires some careful reading to make sure you’re doing what you think you’re doing. Youtube has a number of walk throughs. For the 100G partition it took about 1:35 to backup.

Above you see the SSD attached to the ultra slim sled that the laptop hard disk was in, this is a very slim metal sleeve with a pull tab and some rubber bumpers. It fit nicely into my W520.

Step 3) Swap the drives. If you have a password on the drive, it’s a good idea to disable before removing it as USB enclosures and passworded drives don’t mix well. Install the new SSD, and place the existing drive into a USB enclosure. Boot the laptop into Ubuntu Live again and partition the new SSD drive, make sure to tag the new partition as with the ‘boot’ flag.

Step 4) Restore the image you saved with Clonezilla’s “restore part” option. In this case I was restoring from the 2nd partition on the original hard drive that is now mounted as a USB volume. Clonezilla warns you twice when restoring a partition to validate you’ve got the correct destination, a nice paranoid touch.

The restore ran nearly 3x faster taking about 37 minutes.

Step 5) Boot into windows, chkdsk may have run again but with the SSD it seemed to take no time at all. You might want to visit the OCZ site and grab the toolbox utility to validate you’ve got the latest firmware, I did this to verify I had 2.15.

Performance

After I did the clone, I ran some boot time tests on the hard drive. I tested immediately after I had completed step 5 with the SSD. For work I need Lotus Notes up and running to access my calendar etc, so that was a logical pattern to benchmark – how long to get back to key information? I used a stop watch, and the times include the time I spent typing in the two passwords and navigating to the icon to launch Notes. It’s not terribly scientific, but I think the results still speak for themselves.

Disk test 1 Disk test 2 Disk test 3 SSD test 1 SSD test 2 SSD test 3
Cold boot to Windows login 1:22 1:24 55 23 23 23
Login to launch of Notes 1:42 1:13 1:44 10 10 10
Lotus Notes ready 40 44 40 10 10 11
Total time 3:45 3:22 3:19 43 43 44

This is crazy hot – more than 3x faster, under a minute from a cold boot.

Now certain operations don’t seem any faster. Resuming from hibernation feels to be about the same speed. This makes sense as the performance difference for sequential reads isn’t much different. It seems in normal usage, lots of little things are more immediate too. Some of this is likely simply moving from a SATA2 to a SATA3 drive, but I’m convinced no spinning platter could keep up with the SSD.

Review: Filtrete 3M-50 Wifi Thermostat

I came across this particular wifi enabled thermostat a year or so ago, unfortunately they are not available in Canada. I’d guess this is simply the additional headache of bringing an electronic device to market in Canada (yes, different hoops than what is needed in the USA) and the market size. On my last trip to the states I took the opportunity to drop into a HomeDepot and pick one up. There was only 1 unit in the entire city I was in (I had to go to both HomeDepot stores!) – so you may have trouble getting one even if you live in the US, I suggest you call ahead.

The sales pitch on having your home thermostat wifi enabled is to make it simpler to program, and easier to adjust from anywhere in the house or out of the house. When we leave on vacation, turning down the heat and reprogramming the 7 day schedule is pretty low on the priority list. Being able to do so from the hotel over the internet would be handy. I’m looking forward to the ability to pull out more statistics from the device and surface them in graphs, for example yesterday my furnace was on for 4hrs 47mins and today it ran 2hrs 46mins (it was much warmer today).

Most of this post will discuss the installation process, as this is primarily my experience with it so far. Some of this will be specific to my particular install but I’ll try to walk you through the process I used to arrive at a successful result. If you want to stop reading here the short version is that it’s pretty cool, you probably want one.

The first step is to read (or at least flip quickly) through the manuals included. The packaging strongly indicates you need a C wire, the manual lists it as optional. The C wire is required, don’t get confused by the manual. Next take a look the wiring for your existing thermostat.

The good news is that the wire coming out of the wall has more than enough conductors to carry a C wire if I need to add one. The bad news is that I’m standing there scratching my head because I don’t really understand the current wiring.  My existing thermostat is a Honeywell MagicStat CT 3300 for which I was able to easily find a manual online. This helped me identify the wiring that was connected.

Next stop is to go take a look at the furnace, to map the other end of the wires. Unfortunately between the furnace and the thermostat I found this, something I’ll call the mess-o-wires.

The mess-o-wires ties in my A/C unit to the furnace and the thermostat. Opening up the furnace I get to the control board where the wiring starts.

So basically I have my furnace, connected to a wire A, this in turn heads to the mess-o-wires, then connects to wire B, this runs upstairs to the thermostat. Mapping the wire colors and connections results in the following table. The last column is the CT3300 hook ups. I also found a helpful reference to understand what the wiring names were.

Color Wire A Wire B CT 3300
Y orange yellow Y
R red red + black Rh + Rc
W1 white white W
G green green G
C black

This lead to an ah-hah moment. So I’m basically running in a 4 wire mode at the thermostat W Y RH G. The RH and RC are bridged back in that mess-o-wires. Knowing this helped me map to the 3M-50 manual for how to properly hook things up. The solution is that I need to fix the mess-o-wires to allow the C wire to run up to the thermostat using the black wire. Let me stress that this is unlikely to be your solution, but the process of wire tracing and mapping should help you understand your current setup and how to perform the install. If this is over your head, call your furnace service folks to do this part.

Once I was past this part, the actual installation went very smoothly – just follow the manual. The wifi unit ships along with the unit, but is not installed and the manuals don’t seem to reference it beyond providing a URL: www.radiothermostat.com/wifi. I inserted the wifi module while the thermostat was on and running, it seemed to handle that just fine. When you do visit www.radiothermostat.com/wifi you’ll find a friendly 3 step process:

  1. Register for an account on the web
  2. Verify Thermostat Installation
  3. Use laptop to connect your thermostat to your local wifi, and then to the internet

It’s not really three steps since step three contains more sub steps. My notes are a bit sketchy here, but it didn’t seem to provide much in the way of hand holding – they assume you know what you’re doing when it comes to wireless setup. At this point I’ll deviate from how I did the setup and talk about the iOS app. If you have an iDevice, then you should do step 3 above entirely using it. I’m not sure how smoothly a second iOS device will work out as it seemed that I was forced to re-setup the wifi connection (step 3) on the iPad even though it seemed to be working fine over a web browser. (again my notes are a bit rough as to what happened) I’m certain you can have multiple iOS devices, you just might have to go through the setup phase more than once.

There is also an Android app. This seems to be poorly advertised as I only found it while writing this post, they should really add it to the website. Adding the app to my phone and logging in, I’m able to view my thermostat without any network re-setup required. So my iOS app experience above of needing to re-setup the wifi must have been due to some other issue I was having.

I will say that I really like the wireless configuration approach. Much better than the Logitech HarmonyLink mess with a USB cable and browser plugins. The HarmonyLink could easily adopt this style of setup – creating an ad-hoc network to do the wireless configuration. The thermostat generates a 5 digit verification code to ensure that it’s really you, the HarmonyLink could simply flash the led to give you a verification pattern.

For some reason Chrome didn’t seem to work to create an account. Switching to Firefox solved this. After I had created the account, Chrome worked just fine. In fact, the website has a reasonable mobile layout as well. So a strike against them for doing something odd with account sign ups, but kudos for getting it mostly right no matter what device you visit the website with.

The iOS app is very simple, it lets you control the basic functions: temperature up/down; home/away; fan on/off/auto; heat/cool. You cannot set a schedule with the app it seems. The schedule can be set on the device (but who would do that?) and via a full web browser. The mobile version of the website is limited in a similar manner as the iOS app. The Android app appears to offer the same functions as the iOS app.

Configuration of Celcius vs. Fahrenheit is supported by the web/iOS/Android app in a single setting. The physical display on the thermostat requires you configure this as is shown on this youtube video. This had me puzzled for a bit until I found the video link, it is also mentioned in the FAQ.

There is a developer API available and folks who’ve created impressive private versions of a web UI. Interesting that temperatures are all Fahrenheit in the developer API, so I assume that’s how it is stored internally. I’ll certainly be experimenting in this direction when I have some time. The forums seems to be fairly active and have some good content in them from the quick browsing I’ve done.