IN THIS ISSUE
- Uniden TRU9466 2 Line Telephone System
- Ford Explorer Sport-Trac 2007
- NEC MultiSync 90GX2 19-inch Flat Panel Monitor
- Targus Mobile Docking Station PA075
- McAfee VirusScan 11 (VirusScan Plus 2007)
- Safety Siren HS71512 Radon Detector
- Griffin iTrip Nano
- Roland SPD-20 Drum Pad
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Uniden TRU9466 2 Line Telephone System
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I’m old enough to remember when phones just rang and talked to you – and fortunately, not quite old enough to have experienced the ones with cranks on the side. Such a phone would be regarded as the drooling, imbecile cousin of telecommunications technology today, suitable only for use as a decorative plant stand.
The plethora of high-technology phones available at present usually sees most homes and small businesses with phones in earshot of every room and closet – typically, each one being of a different manufacture and vintage, all with their own controls and features. Hanging up the phone in the living room invariably causes the phone in the master bedroom to lose its call display, and in extreme cases, starts the dishwasher.
An integrated wireless phone system, while somewhat beyond the scope of the electronics section at Walmart, will allow all the phones at your digs to have a common user interface, to share calls seamlessly and to manage a common speed dialing library if you like. In addition, they look cool.
The Uniden TRU9466 is a peach of an integrated phone system – and we tried a number of its competitors before we settled on this one. Clearly the work of designers who have been building phones since cranks were state of the art, it exhibits a wealth of convenient, intuitive features. Perhaps more to the point, it has successfully eschewed many of the noisome gadgets, buttons, screens, accessories, additions and dancing purple wombats much beloved of lower-priced phones, just so the copy on their packaging can say they do all that stuff too.
The TRU9466 consists of a base station and up to ten handsets – you can buy as many of the latter as you need. Uniden actually makes a variety of compatible handsets for this phone system, allowing you to select among its special purpose handsets, and ones that just look impressive. First chance I get, I’m having one of the yellow and black waterproof ones.
Unlike most of the wireless phone systems we looked at, the TRU9466 is genuinely easy to set up. Each handset needs to be registered with the base station – a requirement which appears to be common to all multiple-handset phone systems – but the procedure’s decidedly quick and apparently bulletproof.
Each phone can be given a name – text is entered into the handsets pretty much as you would create text messages for a cell phone.
Each of the TRU9466’s handsets can be set up with its own library of programmed dialing numbers and speed dial. The phones can send all or part of their dialing libraries to other phones in the system, and to the base station. The library dialing is unusually intuitive to set up and use, with most of the interface operating through a four-way navigation button on each handset.
Despite a relative paucity of controls, the TRU9466’s handsets maintain a surprisingly intuitive, easy to follow menu system for such things as setting ring tones, managing the dialing library, activating privacy options and so on.
One of the most remarkable features of the TRU9466 is its sound quality. Even at a considerable distance from the base station, the wireless handsets are clearer than most hard wired phones. Communicating with the base station at 5.8 gigahertz, they appear to be wholly immune to interference from wireless routers, nearby cell phones, hundred-year-old fractional horsepower motors and other inconsiderate technology – things that ultimately spelled the doom of our previous wireless phone system.
The TRU9466 includes an integrated call display in each handset, so you can tell who’s calling before you pick up the phone and pass on the real turkeys.
Unlike several of the other phone systems we looked at, the base station of the TRU9466 is itself a phone, albeit one which can only be used in speaker phone mode if you misplace its handset. The base station has a generous display panel to assist in configuring and maintaining the system.
…oh yes, and there are selectable ring tones for all the handsets. You can assign different ring tones to each line, and if you really like noodling with such things, specific ring tones to known callers, as identified through the caller ID system and entries in the dialing library. The library of ring tones includes various rings, squawks and warbles, and a number of electronic versions of familiar tunes.
The Uniden TRU9466 arguably resides in the upper portion of the price range for two-line wireless phone systems, but it’s worth what it costs. Quick to install, effortless to use and civilized enough not to play The Yellow Rose Of Texas whenever it rings, the only thing it lacks is a button to send a 110-decibel scream down the line when telemarketers call.
Perhaps this will be available in next year’s model.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Ford Explorer Sport-Trac 2007
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While SUVs are decidedly unfashionable in some quarters, when it’s twenty below in the middle of January, you don’t want to be caught outside in northern Ontario driving a SmartCar. The Explorer Sport-Trac, despite its slightly upmarket name, is a serious little truck that can do battle with all four seasons.
It’s also just about the coolest thing with headlights.
Unlike conventional Explorers, the Sport-Trac is a somewhat disproportional pickup truck, rather than a traditional SUV. Its back half is a small pickup truck box, not an enclosed extension to the interior cabin. This small box – or very large trunk, depending upon your perspective – is ideal for carrying things too large to fit in a car, and as with all pickups, you can leave the tailgate down to deal with materials a bit too long for the box in its recumbent state.
Unlike all pickups, the available locking hard tonneau cover turns the box into a secure storage space, so your stuff won’t get up and walk away while the truck’s parked.
The interior of the Sport-Trac comes with all mod cons. Among its better tricks are:
An incremental speed control, allowing you to increase or decrease the selected speed in one mile per hour or one kilometer per hour increments through a steering-wheel mounted control.
An audio input jack to send your MP3 player through the stereo. Later 2007 Sport-Tracs are said to include iPod interfaces as well, but ours predated this feature.
An automatic rear-view mirror that darkens itself when headlights approach from behind at night. These are hardly new, but this one actually works properly.
Self-locking doors that button themselves down thirty second after the truck starts.
An electronic compass built into the dashboard display.
Lots of configurable options to fine-tune the truck’s electronics to your preferences.
Innumerable interior storage spaces and compartments, in which to lose things you never really wanted in the first place.
As befits a vehicle with ancestors that have been around since the late middle ages, the Explorer Sport-Trac handles perfectly, pulls well and exhibits no rough edges. It’s comfortable to drive even on extended road trips. Its fuel consumption is reasonable for a vehicle of its size.
Easily one of the nicest small trucks on the planet, the Explorer Sport-Trac is a superb ride, especially if you don’t dwell in the urbs. It’s clever, well built, slightly unusual and a treat to drive.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
NEC MultiSync 90GX2 19-inch Flat Panel Monitor
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If you’re considering any other flat panel monitor, you’re about to make a horrible mistake. Nothing beats the Multisync 90GX2.
A slightly unconventional monitor, the 90GX2 has a glossy screen rather than a matt-surfaced one, something its manufacturer refers to as “Opticlear.” While slightly prone to glare under harsh lighting, this texture-less surface allows the screen of the 90GX2 to display precise, flawless pixels. Everything on it looks like a huge, laser-sharp photograph.
In addition to being nice to look at, the 90GX2 is quick. Often advertised as a gaming monitor, it offers a four millisecond response time. Most contemporary flat panel monitors weigh in at six to twelve milliseconds. The result is a complete absence of cursor ghosts, flicker and other common monitor artifacts.
One of the surprising small-print features of the 90GX2 is a built-in USB port extender, with two ports hidden with its other cable connections and two protruding from the side of the screen. This is a clever way to get USB connectivity onto your desk without having a hub dangling at the end of its cable.
The setup controls for the 90GX2 are unusually well thought out, with comprehensible menus and a tiny front-mounted joystick to navigate them. You’ll only use them once, but you’ll unquestionably appreciate them when you do.
The NEC 90GX2 is the flat panel monitor of the gods. It costs somewhat more than lesser screens – once you plug it in, you won’t care what it cost.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Targus Mobile Docking Station PA075
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You’re unlikely to need one of these, and even more unlikely to need one for the reason for which we bought a bunch of them, but this box was such a perfect solution to a seemingly insurmountable problem that we felt it deserved a mention.
The Targus Mobile Docking Station is intended to connect to the USB port of a laptop and provide it with a host of other ports it might not have started life with. Powered up and plugged, in, it will provide its host computer with a parallel printer port, an RS-232 serial port, two additional USB ports, an Ethernet port – that actually works really well, much to everyone’s surprise – and conventional PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports.
Now, most laptops won’t need any of this stuff, as contemporary printers, keyboards and mice come with USB interfaces, and you can only buy laptops without Ethernet jacks if you shop at really unfashionable garage sales.
The Targus Mobile Docking station is probably a handy little accessory for itinerate road warriors who might find themselves in unfamiliar territory confronted with dusty peripherals.
In fact, the Targus Mobile Docking station was lauded and drank to here for quite a different reason. Plugged into desktop computers, it allowed a number of Alchemy Mindworks employees who shall not be identified to continue to use their favourite ancient AT-style keyboards when we upgraded the computers to systems with USB keyboard interfaces.
We were all quite shocked that this worked, and worked perfectly.
A product of Targus Group International – which appears to be primarily a luggage manufacturer – the Targus Mobile Docking station has the shortest learning curve of any technological device more complex than a light bulb. Plug it into a USB port, attach its power supply and it’s completely good to go – there’s nothing to configure, program, identify or adjust. It does what it says on the box to a truly impressive degree.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
McAfee VirusScan 11 (VirusScan Plus 2007)
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Sadly, after a long and distinguished history as the preeminent Windows anti-virus product, we were compelled to consider VirusScan 11 as one of the lemons that snuck in. Unfriendly, unworkable and apparently unfixable, this is a security application that does its job entirely too well. Users of VirusScan 11 might come to suspect that it's been designed to defend them against themselves.
To its credit, VirusScan offers a rich library of virus signatures and it has some serious talent at dealing with cyber-nasties behind it. Its deficiencies, however, are in its user interface, its paucity of configuration options and its customer support… or the lack thereof.
VirusScan is part of the larger McAfee Security Center suite, a gathering of security applications including a firewall, real-time e-mail scanning, application integrity checking and several other tools. It must be said that all of these products do what they claim to do, and do it well. They just refuse to stop doing it, even if you have no need of their services.
Unlike earlier virus scanners, which were stand-alone applications that could be run when their users felt the need to scan their systems, VirusScan loads when your system boots up and stays running all the time. Left with its default configuration, it wants to scan your incoming e-mail, perform a complete system scan periodically, prevent most applications from accessing the Internet from your system and otherwise second-guess your every move.
While this should – at least in theory – keep your computer as virus-free as anyone short of God and Her immediate subordinates can make it, it requires a lot of system resources and system hooks to do so. The dual-core 2.66 gigahertz Pentium system we installed VirusScan on behaved like a garage-sale Windows 95 machine, with VirusScan soaking up much of its power. E-mail access became erratic. VirusScan’s pop up windows, warnings and messages were interminable.
After considerable banging away at its configuration screens, VirusScan eventually relented to having its myriad of automatic security features disabled. With this configuration, it will only scan for viruses when it’s called upon to do so. However, it still remains a running application all the time, soaking up some system resources, and it insists on displaying a warning that the computer it’s running on is not protected every time the system boots up.
While it’s possible to reach an accommodation of sorts with VirusScan, it’s hardly a perfect one. The software cannot be persuaded to scan individual files or folders – it insists on scanning an entire drive at the very least, and really wants to look at every local and networked device it can find. It can’t be configured to ignore specific files that are known to be safe, and will delete or quarantine files without permission if it thinks they’re infected.
It might be the case that some of the foregoing can be further addressed in VirusScan's configuration screens, but we were unsuccessful in having the matter dealt with by McAfee's support staff. Support for VirusScan consists of fairly maddening chat windows and a number of public forums wherein users can post questions and hope that someone else will come along and post a resolution. Some help does appear to be provided by McAfee staff who moderate the forums, but after several months of posting to it, we were unable to find work-arounds for the foregoing issues.
There are more immediate support options available for McAfee’s products, for an additional cost. Speaking with a live technician, for example, starts at $2.95 per minute. We didn’t explore these – by the time we’d exhausted our patience with the support forums, the next step was clearly looking for a more workable virus protection product.
VirusScan 11 may be a workable security option for users who are relatively new to Windows, and who are prepared to sacrifice a significant volume of system resources and utility in exchange for a nearly bulletproof defense against the most determined villains of the Internet. Even moderately experienced users will probably find its aggravation level outweighs its ability to defend their systems from viruses.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Safety Siren HS71512 Radon Detector
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Something of a one-trick pony, the Safety Siren Radon Detector’s trick’s a decidedly important one. Radon is a colorless, odorless gas that’s created when trace amounts of uranium in the rocks and soil around buildings decays. Radon is itself radioactive – breathing significant quantities of radon can increase your risk of lung cancer. The EPA in the United States estimates that 12,000 to 15,000 cases of lung cancer per year result from radon exposure.
Traditionally, testing your digs for radon involved capturing air samples and sending them to a lab for analysis, which was sufficiently slow, expensive and unreliable as to make radon testing about as common as ethical politicians. The threat of radon-related illness didn’t get much ink.
The Safety Siren Radon Detector looks a bit like a smoke alarm, but it detects radon. It will display a numerical value for the number of picocuries per liter of radon. The EPA’s web page, among others, will outline the level of risk for specific radon concentrations.
Radon concentrations are usually highest in your basement, which is closest to the rocks where uranium can be found.
The Safety Siren Radon Detector is easy to use – find a suitable location for it and plug it in. It does take a day to so to collect enough air samples to produce meaningful results. In that it will beat up your credit card for less than two old-style laboratory radon tests, it’s extremely cost effective.
While our detector never got involved with the “siren” portion of its name, it apparently will start screaming if it detects really high levels of radon. You’d probably want to call in the guys in haz-mat suits if this happens.
As an aside, decaying uranium produces very little radon gas, and it escapes from rocks and soil under almost no pressure. As such, if the Safety Siren Radon Detector starts displaying disturbingly large numbers, you can mitigate the radon in your basement. Patching any openings in your foundation, and finishing your basement, will usually drop your radon levels down to something of concern only to laboratory mice. In extreme cases, there are professional radon abatement companies, which will turn up in a white van with lots of hardware in the back and address the problem.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Griffin iTrip Nano
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I love iPods, but not their headphones. Sticking bits of plastic into my head just seems wrong. Perhaps more to the point, putting speakers that close to the inner workings of your ears – even every small speakers – carries with it the very real risk of doing serious damage to your hearing.
This, and walking around with wires dangling from your face looks silly.
The iTrip Nano from Griffin Technology will turn any iPod Nano into a very, very small radio station. It will allow your iPod to play through a nearby FM radio, rather than piping its tunes directly into your brain.
While applications for this device will no doubt vary among users, I used it to transform an iPod into satellite radio without the monthly bill. It plays through the radios of an assortment of vehicles – not all of which, like the Explorer reviewed earlier in this issue, have audio input jacks.
Northern Ontario lacking anything resembling a jazz station, the combination of a handful of iPods and the iTrip Nano has served to make long road trips a bit shorter, and it subdues the tricked-out Hondas with 1200-watt stereos so beloved of the tourists that migrate up here each summer.
The iTrip Nano is one of the most elegant iPod gadgets I’ve encountered to date. It consists of a plastic plate that slips behind an iPod Nano, roughly doubling its thickness and adding half an inch or so to its height. It’s powered by a host iPod’s internal batteries. When it’s docked with an iPod, it automatically wakes itself up and starts playing.
The iTrip’s sound quality is comparable to that of an iPod – certainly as good as anything else that’s likely to be received through an FM radio – and it includes internal logic to adjust its host iPod’s volume to prevent it from being overmodulated, and distorting its sound.
The iTrip can be tuned to any available FM radio frequency – you’ll want to find one that’s not being used by a genuine radio station to avoid interference from the sorts of music the iTrip lets you forget was ever recorded. It has a range of a yard or two, which is ample to get from your dashboard to the antenna for your car’s radio.
The iTrip Nano is configured through a control wheel on the side of its case, and several screens which it adds to a host iPod when it’s attached. The control wheel is arguably its least agreeable feature, being a bit funky and awkward to use. This having been said, you’re unlikely to want to use it much once you’ve set up the iTrip, and its funkiness can probably be forgiven.
There is one other issue to keep in mind about the iTrip Nano – being powered by a host iTrip’s batteries, it will reduce the playing time of a iPod between charges. Left to its own devices, a fully charged iPod Nano seems to be able to play for twelve to fourteen hours. This drops to five or six hours with the iTrip attached.
…which I can’t help but find to be an equitable compromise, given that the alternative out here is to listen to something called “Moose FM.”
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Roland SPD-20 Drum Pad
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The problem with most electronic drums is that they sound like electronic drums. Not having to give up a huge volume of space to a traditional drum kit is an attractive prospect, but perhaps not as attractive as it might seem if the resulting percussion smells strongly of transistors.
The Roland SPD-20 drum pad does acoustic drums so convincingly that you’ll swear you can hear them falling over and crushing someone’s toes at the end of a session. Based on several decades of earlier electronic percussion devices, it offers hundreds of drum sounds, each of them indistinguishable from real percussion toys. It’s also programmable, should you find that hundreds just isn’t enough.
We bought an SPD-20 to handle the percussion for the ancientmusick.com compact disc Three – there’s probably a banner advertisement for it somewhere on this page. It set up and got to work so quickly we were certain we’d missed something. While you can meddle with its workings to a remarkable degree if you want to, the SPD-20 can be used out of the box without even cracking its manual.
The SPD-20 consists of eight rubber drum pads. The sensors hiding beneath the pads are pressure sensitive, so hitting the pads harder produces louder noises. The rubber itself is a remarkable material – it feels very much like a real drum surface when it’s being played, but it can suffer weeks of pounding with barely a scratch.
Offering 99 pre-programmed eight-instrument drum kits, selectable through its control pads and a digital display, the SPD-20 can be a variety of traditional drum kits as well as a world of ethnic and exotic instruments. The jazz drums sound like jazz drums, the rock drums sound overpowering and the deep set will disturb nearby seismographs. You can also play voices, chimes, cymbals, various Indian and African drums and – if you’re mired in the past – a variety of drum sounds from electronic drum systems that do sound electronic.
In addition to its pad inputs, the SPD-20 can accept drum triggers from external sources. You can trigger selected drums with a foot switch – which will nuke your ankles in about fifteen minutes – and from several simulated acoustic controllers offered by Roland. A bass foot pedal and a high-hat controller, sold separately, are highly recommended. You can also control the SPD-20 through its MIDI interface.
While the default drum kits and patches of the SPD-20 are seriously impressive, you can customize its brains out if you want to. Building custom drum kits using the hundreds of available individual drum sounds in the pad is pretty effortless. Creating your own drum sounds involves a bit more head scratching at first.
One of the more worthwhile features of the SPD-20 is its master reset function, which will return it to its factory defaults if something goes horribly wrong.
The SPD-20 is easily the best small percussion system we looked at, and it just gets better once you start playing with it. It combines exemplary sound quality with a simple, easily mastered user interface. Its flexible trigger options makes it suitable as an entire percussion section, or as the nexus of a number of additional controllers.
Finally, at the end of the night, it fits into a briefcase – something most drummers would sell various body parts for.
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