IN THIS ISSUE
- Jupiter diMedici 1321ES Alto Flute
- Toyota Prius
- American Power Conversion ES-350 Uninterruptible Power Supply
- Corel Draw X3 Suite
- Wii Sports
- Kyocera FK-160 BK Ceramic Knife
- DVD: Stargate: The Ark of Truth
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Jupiter diMedici 1321ES Alto Flute
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An alto flute plays a fourth lower than a conventional C flute – it will play naturally in the key of G. It offers a useful lower range for flautists, or a handy way to play in a different range without a lot of transposition and uncomfortable head-scratching. Mostly, they just sound cool.
Alto flutes – at least, reasonably good ones – sound dark and resonant.
Contemporary alto flutes come with either a traditional straight head joint – looking like a conventional C flute with impulse-control issues – or with a curved head joint, such that the flute doubles back on itself. If you’re undecided, you can have both, and for reasons to be discussed in a moment, both is good.
In theory, a curved head joint will allow an alto flute, an instrument considerably larger than a conventional C flute, to be played comfortably even by flautists with short arms. In fact, a curved head joint changes the character of the instrument considerably, and is a worthwhile option even if you aren’t extremity-challenged.
Moderately-priced alto flutes have popped up like illegal vegetables of late, and some of them deserve to be confiscated and burned. The diMedici 1300-series alto is surprisingly good, especially in contrast to some of its shockingly bad contemporaries.
All other things being equal, the tone of a flute improves with the density of the metal from which the instrument is made. Steel – the traditional material of which are wrought economical student flutes – isn’t really up to the task. Steel plated with a few atoms of silver hardly improves on the situation. A solid silver flute gets up and rocks – sadly leaving a trail of weeping credit card statements in its wake for most of us.
The diMedici 1300-series alto flute is a solid silver instrument, and it may be the least expensive solid silver alto available. Depending on how it’s configured, it typically hits the streets at about $2500. Despite its modest cost as serious alto flutes go, it’s very nicely made, and it plays as well as instruments that cost twice as much. Perhaps more to the point, it’s extremely easy to play – it’s quick and responsive across its entire range, and doesn’t require that you undertake special lip exercises and stand on one foot to get low notes from it.
It’s probably worth noting that Jupiter makes student instruments for the most part, and while they do what it says on the box, they’re not the stuff of serious performance. The deMedici imprint is Jupiter’s line of professional toys – they have somewhat more hands-on attention during manufacturing, and they’re usually comparable to more recognizably high-end flutes.
The tone of the diMedici is breathtaking – deep, dark and resonant, it will allow accomplished flautists to do things with the instrument that just aren’t within the purview of a conventional C flute. The quirky interval of a fourth below conventionally-tuned instruments makes improvisation with an alto flute fresh and unexpected.
The diMedici 1300-series alto flute is available with a straight head joint, a curved head joint or – as I bought – with both. Most of the alto flutes I’ve tried have sounded better with a straight head joint, and I was surprised to find that the diMedici alto, at least as I play it, both played and sounded better with the curved joint. If you go shopping for an alto flute, be sure to try it both ways.
The curved head joint also shifts the center of gravity of the instrument closer to the foot joint, making it feel lighter and easier to hang on to.
Despite it’s substantial size increase over a C flute, an alto flute offers a short, graceful learning curve for any reasonably accomplished flautist. The keys of the diMedici alto fall naturally under one’s fingers, and there are no tricky additional keys to remember… save that the equivalent of the B foot key of a C flute is absent on an alto.
It seems to be a peculiarity of professional flutes that they rarely arrive from their respective factories in a playable condition, and virtually always need to be set up before they’re ready to rock. The diMedici alto flute that I bought was no exception, and the shop from whence it came took care of this before it arrived. For this reason, buying one from an on-line retailer probably isn’t an entirely brilliant idea. You’ll almost certainly have to get it set up after it arrives, which is an added expense and pretty much means that you won’t be able to try it out – and potentially return it if you don’t like it – until you sink an few hundred dollars into it.
Honorable mention for this one goes to Harknett Music at www.harknettmusic.com – ask for Jon. They had the flute expertly set up by Jay Gemmill at the Ontario Flute Centre, who could probably make a foot of rusty waterpipe sound like a concert flute given half an hour’s notice.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Toyota Prius
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Unlike the Ford Explorer reviewed in an earlier edition of Storm Gods, we didn’t actually buy a Prius. Not that we mightn’t have liked to – doing so will get you no end of cred with your greener acquaintances – but this one was a rental. Honesty bids me say it wasn’t even a rental by choice. On a recent sojourn to the old world, our flight to Manchester was unexpectedly diverted to Birmingham, and by the time I reached the car rental desk, the Prius was the last chicken in the shop.
Having navigated across Britain in a diminutive minivan driven by a lawnmower engine, a tractor battery and several dozen on-board computers, I was really pleased to get home to the Ford Explorer. Not that the Prius isn’t a clever vehicle – its remarkable fuel economy alone is good for half an hour’s conversation down the pub. You don’t just drive a Prius, however – you almost have to be prepared to enter into wedlock with one.
Should you have ignored the considerable marketing behind the Prius, this is a hybrid automobile. It’s powered by a 1.5 liter gasoline engine and a pair of electric motors. The electric motors drive the car at low speeds. The gasoline engine starts when the Prius is asked to get up and move, or when its batteries require charging. The electric motors are used as generators to charge the car’s batteries when the gasoline engine is running.
The power train of the Prius drives a planetary gear set, rather than a traditional automatic transmission. It behaves as a continuously-variable transmission, with only three user-selectable settings – forward, reverse and neutral.
The on-board computer of the Prius is a masterwork of sneakiness, automatically selecting the gasoline or electric drive as needed, maintaining the batteries in an optimal state of charge to ensure maximum battery life – at least ten years, according to Toyota’s literature – and largely succeeding in keeping the remarkable complexity of the Prius out of your face. You need never know what’s going on under its hood.
Knowing what’s going on behind the wheel may prove sufficiently daunting.
The first thing a driver new to the Toyota Prius will note is that almost nothing about it works in quite the same way as does a conventional automobile. The key isn’t a key – it’s a plastic box that fits into a slot in the dashboard. Starting the Prius is a somewhat more complex procedure than would be the case for a gasoline-powered vehicle, although you will get used to it in time. Driving it is a life-changing experience.
One of the coolest things about the Prius is how little fuel it consumes, and it includes a dashboard display to keep its driver apprised of its remarkable economy. It can reach eighty miles to a gallon of gas on highways, but consistently achieving this sort of fuel consumption will require that most of us change the way we drive. Given a week or two of practice, you’ll have the Prius exactly where it wants you.
There are a number of putative drawbacks to the Prius to keep in mind:
- It’s ugly. Designed to have the minimum possible wind resistance, the aerodynamic shape of the Prius is all about reducing drag. You can get used to looking at it, but I doubt many Prius owners will want to be photographed next to one.
- It has a very small rear window. For practical purposes, you can’t see much out the back of a Prius. When you put a Prius in reverse, a rear-mounted video camera takes over the dashboard display panel, displaying not only what you’re about to back up into, but guidelines to indicate the position of the vehicle. I’m not sure this is as good as being able to see where you’re going, but it’s slick.
- It has the acceleration of an aging Labrador retriever. Once you get out on the highway and step on it, the Prius is essentially a conventional gasoline-powered car with a very small engine. This is offset to a considerable degree by its low wind resistance and low weight – the designers of the Prius appear to have used every trick, incantation and state-of-the-art composite available to keep the weight of the car down – but you’ll have no need of a stopwatch to gauge its performance. A calendar will suffice.
- The seats are hard. I’m pretty sure this has nothing to do with fuel efficiency – I suspect environmentally-conscious drivers just get used to being uncomfortable.
- The dashboard-mounted touch panel display does everything, and possibly a few things it shouldn’t. It handles the satellite navigation, shows you the car’s fuel consumption, indicates which of its drive systems is currently in use – it also runs things like the window defrosters. This means that if you want to turn on the air conditioner, you’ll need to navigate through the system’s icons… arguably not something the driver of a car should be turning his or her attention to at sixty miles an hour.
In its defense, the Prius has endured crash tests and managed four or five stars in all of them. It’s responsible for a lower level of emissions than most dishwashers, and it engenders a state of rapture amongst the air-quality tsars of California. It’s agreeably roomy inside, with a rear trunk area capable of holding two large suitcases, or a week’s groceries – we used it for both.
Driven in town, the Prius is really quite cool. It makes optimum use of its electric drive system, only enabling its gasoline engine periodically. It’s quiet, and it just seems to go forever before it wants its tank topped up.
Taken out into the great rural void between cities, the Prius isn’t a lot of fun. It’s placid, slow and actually a bit frightening when it’s asked to get moving and largely refuses to do so.
Hovering around $25,000, the Prius may be an interesting option for urban transportation, especially if you typically travel short distances in traffic, and never get out past the suburbs. During the time we had ours, I believe it saved us about twenty dollars in fuel costs over the Ford Focus we’d originally planned to rent. This was good for several pints of truly excellent beer – I’m not sure it would have been worth drilling down through the Prius’s touch screen icons to turn the heat on while navigating a traffic circle.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
American Power Conversion ES-350 Uninterruptible Power Supply
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Uninterruptible power supplies are almost as exciting as photocopiers, and the buying decisions surrounding them are usually predicated upon the nearest box with a plug at one end and a battery inside. It’s easier to develop a consuming interest in zucchini.
There are a lot of very inexpensive UPS devices – at least, there are a lot of them that cost less than the APC ES-350, which is relatively pricey as these things go. This having been said, none of them represents a really huge pile of cash, and the extra few dollars required to leave the shop with a state of the art, utterly reliable UPS is arguably worth it.
The ES-350 is an uninterruptible power supply turned up to ten, with every conceivable feature. It won’t make tea, but there’s a place to plug in the kettle.
In its most elementary sense, a UPS consists of a battery charger, a battery and an inverter, this latter box of chips being a device to turn the DC power from a UPS battery into a sufficiently convincing simulation of AC power as to allow it to power computers, televisions and other technology. While a singularly convoluted way of doing absolutely nothing most of the time, if the power fails, the battery in a UPS will keep running whatever’s plugged into it with no detectable disturbance in the force.
One important consideration of all uninterruptible power supplies is that they’re far from efficient. The process of converting AC to DC, charging a battery and then converting DC back to simulated AC consumes some power. The ES-350 was somewhat more efficient in this respect than a few of the low-cost UPS systems we’ve tried. As an example, a desk lamp with a 60 watt light bulb plugged into the wall consumed 52 watts, as measured by a Kill A Watt power consumption meter. The same lamp plugged into the ES-350 caused the ES-350 to consume 63 watts.
It’s a good idea to choose a UPS to match the power requirements of the device you intend to plug into it, for this reason. A UPS that’s considerably more powerful than you actually require will be larger and more expensive than it needs to be – it will also consume more power just running itself.
Cheap ‘n nasty UPS systems with brand names you’ve never heard of are a lot less efficient as a rule, and blow away a lot more watts.
American Power Conversion has been making uninterruptible power supplies since way before they were trendy, and this most recent generation of their products is seriously well put together. It does what it says on the box – providing both uninterruptible power and bulletproof surge suppression. However, this UPS has a brain inside. Connect it to an Ethernet port and the software included with it will strike up a conversation with it.
The PowerChute application bundled with the ES-350 will let you log into the UPS and configure it. For example, you can silence most of its audible alarms through its user interface. This is something most users of these devices will unquestionably wish to do – if you’re suddenly plunged into darkness by a power failure, you probably won’t need the incessant beeping of your UPS to alert you that something’s amiss.
You can also fine tune the behavior of the ES-350 in software, configuring it for different external circumstances. It can be adjusted to allow for power supplied by a generator, for example, which tends to be a bit noisy and erratic.
Finally, the PowerChute software can be configured to shut down your computer in an orderly and safe manner if the power is off line for a sufficient period to get down to the end of the battery life of the ES-350. While this function is entirely optional, it can save you from having to recover from Windows fainting unexpectedly, something it usually proves to resent the next time it boots up.
The ES-350 will provide 50 watts of power from its internal battery for 24 minutes, 100 watts 100 watts for 10 minutes and 200 watts for two minutes. It’s one of a range of uninterruptible power supplies in the ES suite – you can buy larger versions of it to provide more power for longer periods. In our case, we only needed the UPS to run for about a minute, this being the time it takes our emergency generator to get up to speed and bring itself on line if the lights go out.
The ES-350 also includes a surge suppressor for a telephone line, which will go some way in defending your phone, FAX machine or other communications toys against lightening strikes.
Compact, easy to deploy and impressively reliable, the ES-350 is the perfect UPS. You can ignore it for most of its life without having it become the center of attention when you suddenly discover you need it. The first time it prevents several hours of your work from disappearing into an alternate universe, it’ll seem worth several times its purchase price.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Corel Draw X3 Suite
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Dating back to just after the dawn of time, the Corel Draw suite of graphic applications is a rich, sophisticated drawing environment. The primary applications included with the X3 suite are Corel Draw and Corel Photopaint – a vector drawing package and a bitmapped paint package respectively – but the package includes a number of more specialized tools, a huge collection of fonts and a gallery of clip art.
Back in the late nineties, when Corel Draw was seriously state of the art, it did everything, did it well and came with an impressive collection of toys. It does all the same stuff today, but it feels like someone forgot to drag it into the new millennium. Its user interface has become cluttered and mildly unintuitive, and its collection of clip art and other ancillary graphics seems decidedly dated.
Honesty bids me say that we bought Corel Draw X3 to replace Corel Draw version 7, which predated Windows XP and didn’t get along with it very well. In this respect, the X3 software was worth the price of an update. Long-time users of Corel Draw will find everything more or less where it’s supposed to be, and the X3 suite will present experienced Corel Draw hands with little down time.
It will be a beast of truly B-move proportions for anyone trying to get up to speed with it from a standing start.
Corel Draw appears to have been the victim of a marketing department that wanted to be able to say that it can do absolutely everything. Well you may ask if it really needs a dedicated drawing tool to create cartoon speech bubbles, or one that draws stars. Some of its tools, like the interactive drop shadow generator, are both genuinely useful and pretty easy to master. You’ll probably have to search in the tool box for a while to find them in amongst the special pliers that only remove the nuts that hold down Buick carburetors and a collection of hammers custom-made for squashing june bugs.
There’s a decided lean toward producing graphics for web pages in this version of Corel Draw, and perhaps away from commercial pre-press. For example, it no longer appears to support Pantone color matching directly, one of its more convenient features in times past.
Once you get a feel for where everything is in Corel Draw, it’s a powerful drawing environment. Its interactive fill functions are particularly slick, allowing it to fill objects with complex gradients. They do take some getting used to.
Corel Photopaint is a capable image retouching application. It actually manages its work space as a set of objects which get rendered into a final bitmap when you export one of its documents to a raster format. As such, its text is editable after its created, you can resize previously drawn objects and so on. It too has a somewhat pendulous learning curve, and some of the functionality of earlier versions of Corel Photopaint has mysteriously disappeared from this one.
Corel Draw has always come with legendarily bad manuals, and at times past I was pleased about this – in an earlier life, I wrote a number of successful third-party books about it. Bereft of such ulterior motives, I couldn’t help but glance disparagingly at the novel that accompanied the X3 suite. It was impressively large, but it did little more than explain the functionality of the software. There was little guidance to assist newly elevated graphic artists in getting real-world tasks completed. Commercial pre-press occupied a bit over seven pages therein, for example. There were five pages on using color – in a book printed entirely in black and white.
Despite its shortcomings, Corel Draw X3 is a worthwhile drawing package – it hints at greatness, however, and perhaps this is what’s truly disappointing about it. It feels like it could have been a good deal more than it is.
Perhaps there’ll be an X4 suite one day soon.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Wii Sports
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One game console seems pretty much like another, and if the prospect of huddling in a darkened living room bludgeoning phosphor aliens all afternoon touches you with the sort of dread hitherto reserved for children’s birthday parties and small fuel-efficient cars, you’d probably resolve the issue by ignoring the lot of them.
The Wii game console, by Nintendo, is different… or at least, it can be. While it has access to a huge library of mindless violence, CGI monsters and bad driving, it comes with a DVD of games which is none of these things. Wii is intended to be played socially.
The Wii Sports game collection that’s packaged with the most popular configuration of Wii consists of a suite of traditional leisure games – golf, bowling, tennis and such – all designed to be played by multiple people. None of them involve killing anything… I believe a baseball bat is the only potentially deadly weapon available, and it can only be used in accordance with its manufacturer’s specifications, to wit, to hit baseballs.
I can’t help regarding golf as one of the most lamentable wastes of time and grass yet devised by higher life forms, but Wii golf is enjoyably removed from a foursome of dentists with titanium clubs. It features nine holes of remarkably convincing golf with sprawling fairways, treacherous winds… and pendulous cliffs below which lies a ball-swilling ocean for the unwary. We usually play it with a crackling fire on the hearth and a box of cookies.
As with all the adventures of Wii sports, the golf game is played through Wii’s uniquely flexible hand controllers. Held like a golf club, it behaves like a golf club, with a considerable degree of nuance.
Wii golf is remarkable in its ability not to grow boring. Played frequently, it allows its combatants to improve their games, learn the course and stun a few birdies and eagles. It’s well removed from blasting the same drooling monsters every night.
Wii bowling is equally entertaining. The Wii hand controller is made to pretend to be a bowling ball in this outing. It can be played with considerable skill… refinements such as ball spin are well within the scope of the game, although I’ve rarely managed to get it to spin where I wanted it. The pin simulation is cool.
In a real sense, Wii is a game console for gown-ups…perhaps semi-grown-ups. It can support up to four players in most of its games. You can spend all evening playing it without coming away feeling like you’re wearing over-large jeans and a backward baseball cap. The games have no cheat codes, secret screens or undocumented levels… kids’ll just hate them.
A DVD with some additional golf courses wouldn’t go amiss by now.
As an aside, Wii Sports comes with one hand controller – you’ll unquestionably want at least one more. We’ve bought several, one of which came packaged with an additional DVD of games called Wii Play. Despite its superficial similarity to the Wii Sports disc, Wii Play was a bit of a disappointment. Few of the games therein are particularly playable, and you’ll have to work your way through the lemons to reach those that are worth the effort.
As another aside, Wii consoles seem to be a bit hard to find as of this writing – an informal review of the larger on-line retailers saw them universally sold out. You can track them down in smaller venues. We found ours in the electronics section of a local supermarket. You might want to regard the process of tracking one down as game, save that it's played in the real world.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Kyocera FK-160 BK Ceramic Knife
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Kitchen gadgets rarely rise to any detectable level of excitement, and getting hot and bothered about a knife is highly suspect. Thus it was with some degree of foreboding that I watched the unboxing of the Kyocera ceramic knife.
A truly remarkable feat of technology, this is the sort of knife that would make serious chefs rise from their stoves and burst into song, if people really did that sort of thing. It looks cool, it’s obscenely high-tech and it cuts food so precisely as to be able to measure the thickness of a slice of tomato to the nearest molecule.
Ceramic knives, as their name might imply, don’t have steel blades. This is a really good thing, because nobody seems to know how to make decent steel any more. Even fairly high end – and expensive – conventional knives are typically cut from mild steel and shipped with a sharpener.
The Kyocera knives are wrought from ceramic, which is a lot harder than steel. They’re made with a truly lethal edge, and it will stay lethal pretty well forever unless you abuse the knife.
Ceramic blades weigh less than a comparable bit of steel – the KC-130-WH knife is practically weightless. While this takes a bit of getting used to, it ultimately results in a knife that’s less fatiguing to use, and much more amenable to precision cuts.
There are a few caveats in using a ceramic knife. They’re not suited to prying, working bones loose, smashing things or other activities which might stress the blade, as they’re prone to snapping in two. Likewise, dropping one can have lamentable consequences. For practical purposes, they have to be hand washed – putting one in dishwasher will repeatedly impact its blade against the dishwasher racks, leaving it with small nicks that will ruin its edge.
A dulled or damaged ceramic knife can be re-sharpened, but you’d need to send it back to its manufacturer.
Costing less than a modestly-priced serious steel chef’s knife, the FK-160 BK is a much better implement of destruction and anything wrought of metal.
...oh, and they come with the most sinister-looking black finished blades you can imagine.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Stargate: The Ark of Truth
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Short of actually having a working stargate in the back yard – for which we’d unquestionably never be able to get a building permit – Stargate: The Ark of Truth remains the most entertaining way to spend 97 minutes in living memory. With its series cancelled by SciFi channel, Stargate appears to have morphed into direct-to-DVD movies, a format that clearly agrees with it. Having enjoyed more than seven days to complete this uber-episode, the writing’s tight, the sets are flawless, the CGI is better than superb – the bad girl on fire is worth buying the disc all by itself – and the actors have their characters absolutely nailed. The quirky humor and intricate plots that made the Stargate episodes more fun than is legal in some jurisdictions never seem to quit. The bad guys are really, really bad… but it’d spoil the fun to know what becomes of them.
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