I was really impressed by the installation experience (both software and hardware). I didn’t necessarily need all the details it provided but it was good enough to make me notice the attention to detail that went into it; kudos to the dev team. I’m sure that even the hardcore newbies would get through it all most of the time if they read and follow the steps. It automatically found a new version of the installer online, downloaded, and installed it. Showed brief videos demonstrating step-by-step how to install the ink cartridges, etc. Finally, when it asked me to connect the printer to the computer via its USB cable it updated the firmware automatically. Pretty seamless.

Once it was up and running, the first thing I tried was to scan a few pages of sheet music from the magazines I mentioned earlier. The ADF worked really, really well. No jams or slips. However, and this does kind of put a damper on things, I can’t get it to scan both sides of the sheets that are fed through. My old Canon supported this which made it’s ADF scans to PDFs feature really useful. The Lexmark’s scan via ADF to PDF support seems kind of useless unless you’re scanning one-sided pages. Instead, I’m having to resort to using the ADF but creating a JPEG per page. This requires feeding the stack of pages in twice (one for each side) and then sorting the JPEG files once they’ve been scanned. It’s unfortunately going to still be a painful and time-consuming task to scan all the magazines.

Lastly, I printed off some color photos on 4×6 glossy photo paper. The quality looks great actually and there’s nothing for me to complain about on that front.

All in all, it’s pretty nice and probably a worthwhile upgrade for us but not perfect. I’m hoping I’m just missing some hard-to-find, tucked away setting for two-sided scanning via the automatic document feeder but I’m pretty sure I looked everywhere. Oh well…

Lately, while driving, I’ve noticed some cyclists behind me because they had flashing white LED lights. It was specifically the blinking that would get my attention on my rear view or side mirrors. I figured I had to get me some lights as it managed to make me notice riders and every little bit helps when it comes to staying in one piece. I headed over to my local bike shop and checked out their selection. At first, all I saw was the larger lights that are actually meant to illuminate the path ahead of you. That seemed like overkill for me as they’re pretty big, bulky, and heavy and I very rarely ride when it’s dark outside (come to think of it, I’ve never ridden at night yet and don’t really see a reason to change that). Luckily, when I was about to give up, my wife shows up with a tiny light called the Blackburn Flea. It turns out it was exactly what I was looking for.

I picked on up and have gone on a few rides with it since and am pretty happy with it. Here are some thoughts (if you’re considering getting one) and tips (if you already got one) that I’ve come up with along the way:

• The fact that I can charge the light via USB rocks. I can commute to work, plug it in, and feel confident that I’ll have juice for the ride back home later. No batteries to deal with or charger units to lug around, etc.
• When charging, the lights (it has 4 LEDs) will blink dimly to indicate that it’s in fact charging. Once it’s fully charged, the blinking gets a whole lot brighter (kind of hard to miss). If you leave it charging beyond the point where it’s fully charged, it’ll actually continue to blink even after you’ve removed it from the USB connection. This caught me off guard at first but then read somewhere that this was a result of logic built into the device to maximize its charge life.
• The strap it comes with to mount on the bike is just a simple Velcro strap. The nice thing is that it’s super light. The downside is that it’s a strap that you need to strap and unstrap every time you want to charge the light (which I’m currently doing between every ride). Not a huge deal though.
• If the light doesn’t start blinking after plugging it into a USB port to charge, try plugging it in the other direction. Most USB devices can only be plugged in one direction but not this one. It only charges in one direction though.
• There are two other ways to charge these but I’ve only tried the USB method. There’s a solar charger which sounds useful and a seemingly tedious wire-up-to-a-battery approach that I’m going to probably avoid.
• The light has three modes, solid, bright solid, and blinking. The latter is the one that I think has the most “look at me, I’m here!” effect.
• You may wonder if the strap will actually slip on your bars but that hasn’t been a problem for me even though I’m mounting it on an untaped section of my bars.
• It’s super light at just 17 grams. I strap it on to my bars but I imagine you could strap them on to your helmet and not feel the weight at all.
• You can find the manual for it online here.
• There’s a good review with even more interesting comments on bikemag.com.
• Looks like they come with a lifetime warranty that at least one person on the review mentioned on the previous bullet seems to have used after his light stopped working due to riding in a downpour.

Happy (and safe) riding!

In all, I’ve tracked hundreds of activities (rides, runs, etc.) with these devices so far and have never had a single problem–until  yesterday. I participated in the Livestrong Seattle 2010 event and rode the 45 mile route. It was the first time I participated in an organized ride of any sort so it was a bit of a big deal for me. Naturally, I used the Edge 500 to track the ride. We looked at some of the data after crossing the finish line and then I went through my regular routine: hold down the reset button, wait for the 3..2..1 countdown, and see the numbers all zero out. I do this all the time at the end of every ride I’m on.

When I got home, I hooked the device up to my computer and headed over to Garmin Connect to upload the ride’s data. I was a little confused when it reported back that there were no new activities to upload. I checked the history via the actual device and found that the most recent ride I had data for was my last training ride from a few days prior. It’s as if the ride’s data was deleted. Not good–not happy.

Frustrated, I gave up. Today, however, I figured I’d experiment a little and am happy to say I managed to recover the data. In case this happens to anyone else, here are the steps I took to reach my happy ending. Hope it helps:

1. Connect the Garmin device to your computer via the USB cord.
2. Power on the device and you should hear the USB connect sound.
3. Launch your undelete software. I use Active@ Undelete but I suppose similar products would likely work just as well.
4. Browse to the device (seems to be called “GARMIN”) and do an “Advanced Scan.” A “Simple Scan” may or may not work but I figured I’d be patient and wait for the advanced one just in case.
5. Once the scan completes, you should be able to expand the “Garmin” node to see (possibly) many deleted folders with names such as “_739345_”. Ignore those and scroll all the way to the bottom (may be off screen).
6. Expand the “Garmin” folder and then click on the “Activities” folder inside of it.
7. In the files pane over to the right, you should see a list of all the activities you have on your device. They all follow a date format followed by time and use the “.fit” file extension. Look for the one that doesn’t match that pattern and is called “current_activity.fit”.
8. Right-click “current_activity.fit” and select “Recover.”
9. Tell it to save the recovered file to your desktop and call it “recovered.fit”.
10. Now, assuming the file is not corrupt (mine wasn’t), you need to upload it to Garmin Connect. Head over to the site, click on “Upload”, click the “Manual Upload” link at the bottom of the page, browse to the “recovered.fit” file you just saved on your desktop and click the “Upload activities from file” button.

If you were as lucky as I was, you should be sitting there with a smile looking at a screen full of numbers you want to improve on next time.

I wrote that app back in 2000 (back when Windows 2000 was new and slapping a “2000″ at the end of your app’s name was the in thing to do). Every now and then I get emails from folks asking for an updated version that works with UAC (it wrote to the registry in HKLM which requires elevation nowadays) so they wouldn’t have to run it as admin anymore. I figured it wouldn’t be that much work and it would be kind of fun to write some code again–it had been a while.

I dug up the old C++ code and was quickly reminded of the fact that it was actually going to be a fair amount of work (for me) to make it happen. I changed plans and instead decided to write an application in C# from scratch that would do it all and in what I figured would be a couple hours of work. That turned out to be pretty spot on as today I’m sharing out the first version of DeskTips.

Here’s a screenshot of the data it currently supports (time, date, system up time, CPU usage, computer name, and IP address):

And here’s another screenshot that shows the extent of its current UI:

It’s pretty simple and I’m hoping someone finds it useful. It’ll at the very least serve as a new place I can point the folks who still run good old Uptime 2000 but want an update.

If there’s some other information you’d find useful to add to the list of data it supports, just leave me a comment or shoot me a mail (gus at this domain) and I’ll consider adding it to an upcoming version of DeskTips.

You can read more about DeskTips and download it from its fancy product page.

Anyway, here’s a quick summary of the books I read over the last month and a half.

Bringing Nothing To The Party by Paul Carr. This one was a fun read. It focuses on Carr’s ride while doing the startup thing and is filled with plenty of humor, insight into the internet startup scene, and a deeper than expected look at a guy who felt he couldn’t pass up the pursuit of becoming an entrepreneur. This was the first book of the batch I read so it’s not all that fresh anymore (my memory isn’t all that…um, what was I saying?) but I remember really being pleasantly surprised by the honesty that came through towards the end. That topped it off for me and made it a much more impactful book than I had expected. This guy is a true character and probably a great one to share a beer or two with.

Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. This one consists of a collection of interviews with the folks behind many successful startups (new-ish and old) such as TiVo, PayPal, Flickr, and Apple. It was interesting to see some of the common themes shared by many of the companies such as how they almost all ended up doing something substantially different from what they originally set out to do. I go back and forth in thinking the book makes succeeding in startup land easy to an impossible long shot but it’s clear that these folks all enjoyed the ride in the end. Inspiring stuff.

Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing by Mignon Fogarty. While it’s unlikely one would know from my writing, I have a thing for grammar and writing books. It took me till long after it got me grades to get into them but so it goes. While I don’t retain a ton of the stuff I learn in these types of books, it’s still always satisfying to permanently pick up a few things. This book in particular is probably as interesting as the topic could get. Some of the memory tricks suggested aren’t all that easy to remember and it definitely hits a low point when it briefly turns into Internet for Dummies but the majority of the book is great and you’re guaranteed to pick up a few good tips.

One Strategy by Steven Sinofsky and Marco Iansiti. This book is made up of blog posts off of Sinofsky’s internal Microsoft blog with commentary and additional thoughts from Iansiti. I really found this one interesting though, being a Microsoft employee, I’m clearly closer to it all than folks outside the company. It covers the time Sinofsky took over the Windows team and set out to build and deliver Windows 7. I think it offers a pretty deep view into how things work, albeit from a pretty high level, at Microsoft and covers what was surely a pretty challenging project to run. It’s ironic that it took me a book I had to pay for to get me to read something I could have read for free but I’ve now subscribed to the internal blog and will definitely keep up this time around.

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom. It would be a stretch for me to say I really enjoyed this one. It had a few high points and I can’t really feel like it cost too much to read considering it was a two-nighter to go from (virtual) cover to cover. A definite quick read but a bit heavy on the sappiness for me. Morrie was a pretty cool dude though.

Last night, we headed out to the Triple Door (awesome venue) in Seattle to watch Sarah Bettens and Reinout Swinnen play some good tunes. Clayton Senne was the opener and also played an excellent set. Great music at an awesome venue really can’t be beat.They played songs from Sarah’s solo albums but also threw in a couple new K’s Choice songs off their upcoming album. It was an acoustic show so it was pretty relaxed which was awesome but it really makes me look forward to hearing the full band play the new songs. This show kicked off the tour for them and I highly recommend checking them out if you’re lucky enough to have them stop by your part of town.

Here’s a video I shot with my phone (hence the quality) of them playing one of their oldies: Not An Addict.

The Zune I had this problem with was the 80GB model and it had been working for a long time without any problems whatsoever. I updated the software (the latest one–4.2.202.0–from just a couple of weeks ago) when it prompted me to do so. Next time I docked the Zune though I was prompted to update it as well. I went ahead and did that and then somewhere along the way I found I no longer had any of my music sync’d on it anymore. I figured it was a firmware update or something that required formatting it so I just proceeded to sync everything again.

This is when I started running into the “Zune Player isn’t responding” error (C00D124D). In the end, after trying lots of things,  what seemed to be causing the problem for me was having my Zune plugged into a USB hub. I actually tried two different hubs and both reproduced the problem. When I bypassed the USB hub and plugged it straight into the computer’s USB port everything worked fine once again. It took a while to sync the 80GB but it got all the way through without ever running into that error again.

In summary, after trying a ton of different things, the actual steps I took that I think fixed it in my case were:

1. Format and initialize the device (steps can be found here).
2. Connect the Zune dock directly to the PC’s USB port.
3. Connect the device and start a sync.

I suspect it won’t work for everyone who experiences the same errors as I’ve found tons of folks who have been dealing with this frustrating problem for a long time but it definitely worked for me and I’m hoping it does the trick for at least some other folks. I also posted the same info on a thread I found on the Zune Forums that’s been going strong for over a year. We’ll see if it helps anyone there soon.

I’m posting this as I was just about to send this to someone via email to help them through it and figured this could help others too (*and* I can just link to this when I get asked next time). So if you’re on a Windows PC, here’s what I recommend you do to create a properly rotated version of your videos.

1. Start up Windows Live Movie Maker. If you don’t already have it installed, you can install it from here for free.
2. Open up the folder you have the movie(s) you want to rotate in Windows Explorer.
3. Drag the movie from Windows Explorer over to the area labeled “Drag videos and photos here…” in Movie Maker.
4. On the “Home” tab in Movie Maker’s ribbon toolbar (you should be there by default), click on the appropriate button to rotate: ‘Rotate left 90°’ or ‘Rotate right 90°’. At this point, you should now see the video in the correct orientation in the preview pane on the left.
5. You’re now ready to save the video. In the sharing section of the same ribbon toolbar we used in step #4, you’ll see the ‘Sharing’ pane. You can read more about your options here (e.g., save to YouTube, HD or SD file formats, etc.) in the Windows Live Movie Maker documentation.

In my opinion, this is one of the easiest ways to do this for free and using an application that’s coming from a trustworthy source. It is however not all that flexible in some ways (e.g., your options for your rotated video are somewhat limited) but for most folks it should be just fine.

If you’re curious about other ways to do this, here are a few links that may be of interest

• Scott Hanselman’s post on using MPlayer‘s MEncoder command-line tool.
• You’ll find several apps (some free and some not free) by just a quick search on Bing.

Anyway, I called it Fotografi as I couldn’t come up with anything better at the time (nor can I now–actually, I kind of dig it now). We’ll see how it goes.

Since it’s still relatively new (i.e., it was announced ages ago but it recently started actually shipping finally) and I couldn’t find a ton of data on it yet from other folks who have gotten their hands on it, I’m going to write up what I’ve noticed so far hoping it helps someone out who’s deciding on whether to pick this one up or not.

The good:

• The screen is large and very easy to read. You can have up to 8 different data points on any of the three “pages” available to you.
• USB port is on the device itself. No need for a cradle like the Forerunner did.
• Elevation detection is way better than the Forerunner. For example, it wasn’t uncommon for me to ascend 300-400 ft while on a *trainer* in my garage when using my Forerunner. The Edge 500 reports a nice comforting zero every time so far.
• The calories burned reported by the device are a lot more realistic than the Forerunner. Since it uses your heart rate (and maybe some other data) to calculate the calories burned, it’s clearly going to report much more accurate numbers.
• There’s a “Start Notice” feature that does a decent job of alerting you that you’ve started moving and you haven’t pressed “Start” yet. I know that’s happened to me many times in the past and this will surely help me out.
• The way it attaches to your bike’s stem seems more reliable than the mount they offer to hook up a Forerunner to a bike with. I’ve seen the Forerunner fall off those mounts but the twist-mechanism used for the Edge seems pretty secure.
• It’s got a thermometer that now uploads the temperature for each ride to Garmin Connect. I don’t think it’s accurate–it’s always a bit high–but it might be helpful to just compare the deltas from ride to ride.
• It also seems to have more stats like “Grade %” that I don’t remember seeing on the Forerunner.

The bad (all pretty minor–so far):

• The USB port is protected by a small rubber cover that isn’t all that easy to seal shut. Not a huge problem but still a little tedious.
• The Start/Stop and Lap buttons are a little harder to press while riding as they’re on the side of the device. I thought the Forerunner’s buttons were better positioned.
• The calories burned are more accurate than the Forerunner. While this is obviously good there was something extra encouraging about being lied to by the Forerunner’s ridiculously high numbers. :)

Update (12/19/2009): Looks like there’s an updated ROM for the Edge 500 that fixes a few things I hadn’t run into until today. You can get the update from here.