The Take on Tech

Well it’s been a long time coming, but here is the review about the My Child ID. Enjoy!

The My Child ID is a new device from AmberAlert.com, a private company which works with law enforcement, but is not a part of law enforcement, to help with searches for missing children. Especially since time is of the essence when trying to find missing children and worried parents may not be apt to act in the most timely and rational way, AmberAlert.com bills the My Child ID as a device capable of delivering the information needed by law enforcement efficiently and quickly if such a need would ever arise.

The My Child ID in all its glory (click for full view)

The device has functions that resemble those of online backup storage for personal data. It offers a centralized location to store information about one’s child (such as date of birth, physical characteristics, a photo, etc) in the form of an encrypted child profile which will delete itself after ten failed log-in attempts. The device also offers a year of free online storage for the profiles stored on the My Child ID, which is likewise encrypted and which can only be accessed via the My Child ID and a user-generated password unknown to both outsiders and AmberAlert.com itself.

In the event of a missing child, the information on the My Child ID can be readily sent to law enforcement, either by giving over the physical My Child ID device (and accompanying log-in information), or by using the built-in email function of the device.

In terms of making the setup of the device accessible for a wide population, AmberAlert.com did a very thorough job. Stored on the device itself is a PDF manual containing detailed instructions (in both English and Spanish for those curious) on how to use the My Child device and install the My Child software. Installing the My Child software was very straightforward; a couple of clicks and an additional installation of Adobe AIR were all that was required. Setting up the account was likewise very easy. The built-in Child Profile Wizard provided step-by-step pages to fill in the various data required for a profile, with only a minimum reliance on any technological knowledge on the part of the user. And if there are still any doubts on how to use the device, video tutorials are available at www.amberalert.com/mychildid/help/.

What the My Child ID software looks like after logging in (click for full view)

One part of the setup wizard (click for full view)

The device supports JPEG, PNG, and BMP image formats. The representation of photos on the device is rough around the edges. In order to compensate for images which do not fit the native resolution of the screen, the device adds black bars around the image. However, occasionally these black bars are replaced by a single blue block that is only present along one edge of the photo. The contrast of the screen is also rather poor. Although there an option to increase the contrast, this option seems to simply increase brightness rather than noticeably improve contrast.

The device states that it has a battery life of three hours. After keeping a continuous image on the screen, however, the battery life was actually pegged at a little over an hour and forty minutes. Even the addition of the screen itself feels gimmicky. The small size of the screen, the various small issues surrounding viewing a photo, and the low battery life all make the action of viewing pictures on the device a rather forgettable experience, unlikely to be done more than a few times by parents. Luckily, viewing photos was never a fundamental purpose of the My Child ID.

Initially, the memory capacity of the My Child ID seemed to be a more worrisome problem. With a physical total of 128 MB and only 39 MB of actual storage after taking into account the preloaded software, it seemed to be a very real possibility that the memory of the device may run out if too many profiles were added. Part of this is due to the lack of support for file formats which utilize lossless compression (except bitmap images, but few would store photos in the .bmp format). However, to be honest, JPEG has become such a widely used format by now that, since only one photo is required for a profile, it would not be wholly inappropriate for a device to support only JPEG files.

In the end, 39 MB was found to be more than enough to accommodate the needs of most families. Each profile, even with an accompanying picture only took up at maximum a couple of megabytes, making the limit of possible profiles at least around 15 profiles. Of course, 39 MB makes the My Child ID ill-suited as a photo gallery of high resolution images, but as stated before, its role as a photo gallery is neither a strong point of the device to begin with nor is it an essential component.

The My Child ID was not designed to be a workhorse USB drive. Few people would go out and buy a My Child ID to store professional-quality photographs on it, or really to store anything on it besides basic information about a child’s profile. In fact, files stored on the My Child ID device can only be accessed by the My Child ID program that one has to install (otherwise the host computer will be unable to open the files), probably a side effect of the encryption utilized by the device.

However, it may actually be advantageous for the device to expand its memory capacity and fulfill a role both as a vault for information about a child as well as a general purpose USB drive. Since the My Child ID must be in the physical possession of the parent to be of any use (i.e. the parent will either have to constantly carry the My Child ID or keep it in location that will always be easily accessible), any way that it can integrate into the life of a parent makes the device all the more helpful. If the parent currently had his or her current USB drive on a keychain with all of his or her keys, replacing that USB drive with a My Child ID that could perform a similar function may allow the parent to carry the device everywhere and to keep it constantly in reach in all settings, both work and personal without feeling the My Child ID is just deadweight.

Of course the amount of memory would have to be increased and the inconvenience of encryption (when dealing with non-sensitive information) would have to be dealt with, perhaps through the use of separate partitions, one encrypted and one unencrypted. Though to be honest, 39 MB of actual storage is still pretty anemic for a $40 device without an expansion slot for additional memory. Even if the device does come with its own screen and with additional software features, it bears mentioning that one could buy a personal music player with a color screen and several orders of magnitude of additional storage capacity for about the same price.

There are a few other very minor issues. The placement of the serial number of the device on a strip on the USB head makes actually reading the serial number when entering it into the wizard difficult on some computers, although removing the My Child ID device from the USB port and then plugging it back in after one has typed in the serial number, but before clicking “next” on the wizard does not seem to affect the rest of the setup process. The buttons on the device have a tendency to be a tad bit on the unresponsive side.

The essential functions of the My Child ID could be approximated without too much difficulty with a normal USB drive. A spreadsheet with data columns for each child or even a table in a Microsoft Word document with the relevant information and pictures could probably contain the same amount of information (although careful attention would need to be paid to make sure that no important information was left out, something which would not have to happen with the My Child ID). Moreover, although the My Child ID is integrated into the L.E.A.P. network (an AmberAlert.com service used by law enforcement to disseminate information to various parts of an investigation), the information sent by the device or contained by the device does not receive any preferential treatment from law enforcement, at least in the state of Washington, i.e. an email with the aforementioned spreadsheet could potentially serve law enforcement just as well as the information sent from the My Child ID.

However, the My Child ID derives its strengths from the improvements it makes to the user experience. From utilitarian improvements such as encryption to prevent snooping and online backup to the general cleanliness and thoroughness of the setup wizard, the money spent on a My Child ID is probably best thought of as money paid for the services provided by and bundled with the device rather than the hardware itself.

The auxiliary function of the device as a picture viewer feels like a tacked-on novelty and its price tag of $40 may be a little too high. Nonetheless, especially for a non-technologically savvy parent, the My Child ID performs its main duty as a repository for basic information about one’s child admirably, offering a streamlined, helpful interface for entering information and a simple method for retrieving and sending information about a child in case of an emergency.

Update: It looks like Gear Diary has a review on My Child ID here that looks at the device’s software on Linux which mentions some stability problems when running the software on Linux. I will update this post or add a new post if I get an opportunity to try the device out on a Linux machine. That review also mentions in passing some problems on Vista, but the software seemed to be fine when the software was tested for this review on Windows Vista.

For those who read this blog, I apologize for the long delay in making a new post. For the overwhelming majority of people who don’t read this blog, well, it doesn’t really matter anyway.

Before next week, I hope to push out a new post about the My Child ID device. It’s a device on which one stores information about one’s children so that the information can be easily disseminated in case a child goes missing or (Heaven forbid) is kidnapped. The device is currently on my desk right now, awaiting review.

For those one or two souls who read this blog, I wish you a very belated Happy New Year’s.

Now that Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and any other sneaky sales that try to ride on the coattails of these sales have passed (I’m looking at you Fry’s, your “One-Day Holiday Sale,” and you Dell, your “three-days-too-long Cyber Monday sale”) and we have a little bit of a breather before the next batch of “holiday sales” comes around the corner, it’s a good time to step back and take a look at what actually is a good deal and what’s a mediocre deal dressed up in various illusory percentages and “savings.”

One tip when shopping for electronics is to look for the product’s previous generation. If you’re willing to sacrifice a new name and sticker on your product (which is sometimes about as significant as the difference is), you can get a lot in savings. For example, with computer discrete graphics cards, the Radeon 4xxx series is being phased out in favor of the 5xxx series, something which is only going to accelerate when nVidia comes out with their new 3xx series. This means that stores are dropping prices to clear their old stock (to a certain point, once the supplies of a certain item get too low and the corresponding demand gets too high, prices may go up again). On online retailers such as Newegg and TigerDirect, the Radeon HD 4870 can be found for a cheaper price than the Radeon HD 5770, even though the Radeon HD 4870 performs at the same level as or sometimes even outperforms the Radeon HD 5770 (as seen here at Anandtech and here at Tom’s Hardware). The caveat is that the Radeon HD 4870 consumes an insane amount of power compared to the Radeon HD 5770, which depending on your usage habits, may or may not make the 5770 cost-effective.

Another example of this phenomenon is Polk Audio speakers. A lot of electronics retailers have been selling Polk Audio speakers at steep discounts. Though most of them still don’t quite qualify as cheap, many of these speakers have been selling for half or less of their original prices. These prices are mainly due to new generations of Polk Audio speakers coming out and old ones being taken out of stock.

A couple of benchmark prices are always handy to have something to compare prices to. Most basic netbooks sell for around $250 to $300. Thus, when Fry’s was selling a netbook for about $200 over Black Friday, it was a decent deal, but hardly a blockbuster one.

For laptops, ones sporting Intel Core 2 Duo processors, which may be labeled simply as “Centrino” or “Centrino 2″ processors (Centrino and Centrino 2 refer to Intel’s entire mobel platform, not just the CPU although sometimes it is used to refer to the CPU), usually weigh in anywhere from $500 to $700 for lower end models (usually T5xxx, T6xxx, T7xxx, or sometimes P7xxx processors) to $700 or over for those with P8xxx, P9xxx, or T9xxx processors. Laptops with discrete graphics cards can usually be found for about $700 or more as well. Laptops with AMD processors tend to be cheaper (and tend to offer less performance and less battery life as well) usually hovering around $500 to a bit over $600.

Desktops and separate computer components tend to be a bit harder to pin down. In the case of desktops, there is an opportunity for a greater variety of components that can be put in the desktop, and personally adding components is a lot easier than on a laptop so determining estimates of benchmark prices is a bit hard, especially for low-end computers where proportionally more of the price comes from peripherals rather than one or two components within the computer (e.g. the CPU and graphics card or cards). For desktops, most computers over $1,000 should come with a Core i5 or Core i7 processor. Anything below that, down to about $700 to $800, should have either a Core 2 Quad or a Phenom II. Below that, Core 2 Duo, original Phenoms, and Athlon II’s are usually present. Below about $400 to $500, we begin to see Athlon X2, Sempron, Celeron, and Pentium Dual-Core processors.

Computer components’ prices are still in a fair amount of flux. AMD/ATI’s newest and most powerful 58xx and 5970 graphics cards have seen shortages which caused AMD to bump up their prices. This means prices north of $300 for the 5850, $400 for the 5870, and $600-$700 for the 5970. As the stocks of AMD’s 4xxx series start to run dry, what had been a downward trend in prices is seeing a slight hike as well. 4830’s are now over $100 and 4870’s are now around $140. On the nVidia side of things, the GTX 260 is going for about $200 or over now and the GTX 295 is going for about $500 or more.

Yet amid the inevitable flurry of holiday deals, the most important point to remember isn’t the prices themselves. Keep in mind that price shouldn’t determine why you buy something, but rather where you buy something. “A good deal” does not justify spending money on something you would never use anyway (the only real exception I can think of to this is reselling the item later), but rather allows you to choose the retailer from which to buy something which you already wanted or otherwise already had a need or use for.

As some of you may know, the Bellevue Reporter offices flooded when a water pipe broke last week and the reporters moved to the Mercer Island Reporter for a week before moving back to the Bellevue Reporter. Well, what does this have to do with technology (besides perhaps the failure of it)?

The Bellevue Reporter offices have both iMacs (and an eMac that the author gets to use) and PCs running Windows. The Macs survived the flood. The PCs got fried. Why? The reason itself is pretty mundane and has little to do with the build quality of either, except perhaps for the lack of a completely sealed, waterproof PC case (those pesky PC manufacturers, failing to seal their PCs with cases capable of being utterly inundated, how could they fail to foresee such a circumstance?). The iMacs are all-in-one computers with all the hardware components stuffed behind the display. They sit on our desks at all times. However, the hardware components of a PC, apart from the monitor, are stored in a separate tower case. When you have a tower case, to save space on the desk, you usually place it on the floor… Then a flood happens.

Our PCs are still suffering from unfortunate dihydrogen monoxide poisoning. It looks they are all pretty much dead and we’ll have to get new ones. So the next time you’re thinking about floods when you’re buying a PC (who doesn’t associate flooding with computing) make sure to get one with a nice enough case that you wouldn’t mind sticking on top of your desk. Or just get a Mac*.

*Or any other all-in-one computer.

For those of you who aren’t quite willing to jump on the Windows 7 bandwagon and instead are sticking with Vista,  Microsoft has rolled out an update for Vista, bringing its graphics capabilities up from DirectX 10 to DirectX 11, the same level as Windows 7.

For those of you who are curious what DirectX is, it’s an API, an Application Programming Interface. The basic function of an API is to provide a set of standards allowing different programs to communicate with each other on a computer. It is akin to the use of language between two people (stand-ins for programs), Bob and Joe, so that they can get what they want. If Bob wants something (say he’s Joe’s boss and he wants a report from Joe about something), he tells Joe that he wants a report. APIs facilitate the “tell” part. Bob doesn’t need to know anything about how Joe makes a report. Joe simply gives Bob a report. DirectX is an umbrella of APIs which covers everything from 3D graphics to sound. The reason that DirectX gets new version (and why any API gets updated) is to incorporate new items, or, sticking to our Bob and Joe analogy, new vocabulary. Let’s say that suddenly Joe acquires the ability to make PowerPoint Presentations. Bob with his current “API” can only request a report; he simply doesn’t know how to say anything else, so even if Joe can make presentation slides, Bob can’t get any. He has to update his vocabulary with “presentation slides” in order to take advantage of Joe’s new abilities. Likewise, if new abilities appear on the programing scene, new APIs or updates to old APIs must be created to allow other programs to take advantage of these abilities.

Not many games been released using the DirectX 11 API (Application Programming Interface), though to be fair when DirectX 10 came out for Vista the situation was similar. Likewise, just as with the DirectX 10 launch, hardware support for DirectX 11 is also currently limited (AMD/ATI’s 5xxx series are the only graphics card on the market right now that support DirectX 11 and currently there are only two flavors: 58xx and 57xx). However, it is still nice for Vista owners to know that their OS is “future-proofed” at the moment against new games should they decide not to install Windows 7.

The download link for this update can be found here. It should also appear in Windows Update on Vista machines. Vista Service Pack 2 is a prerequisite for this update.

Windows 7 came out yesterday. The public beta, RC (Release Candidate), and RTM (Release To Manufacturer) versions of the operating system had already acquainted us with what was going to be in that plastic box.

One of the first things that Windows 7 addressed was the minimum system requirements of Vista. One of Vista’s problems during launch was that many of the computers it was installed on were too anemic to properly run Vista. The operating system would feel too sluggish and users would feel too angry. By sticking with (or in terms of hard drive requirements actually decreasing) the minimum system requirements for Vista, Windows 7 is now accessible even to lower-end computers, since computer hardware technology has marched forward since Vista.

There already have been quite a few nice summaries on the web about Windows 7’s new capabilities so I’ll just list the big ones out here briefly with their practical implications.

New Taskbar: (All versions of Windows) The new taskbar has simple icons at the bottom, which group all the windows of a single program together. It streamlines working with multiple windows open and with the combination of Aero Peek allows for easy organization and viewing of various windows. And it’s pretty.

Aero Peek: This is a feature that lets you see little previews of your windows when you scroll over them. Although already present in Vista to some degree, Windows 7 takes this a little bit further by offering the ability to directly close the program from

Aero Snap: By moving windows to the side of the screen or to the top, the window can be enlarged to cover half of the screen or the full screen entirely. Makes maximizing things (and placing two documents side by side without having to manually resize them) a… nope not gonna say it. Cheap puns are bad for the soul.

Aero Shake: By shaking windows, you can minimize all other windows. It’s like giving your windows ADD. And it’s pretty awesome, if a bit odd.

Multitouch Interface: By using multitouch gestures (i.e. ones that involve touching the screen in more than one place), you can zoom in, zoom out, rotate, etc windows. Unfortunately, only a minority of computers right now have touch-capable screens.

Jump Lists: On the taskbar, jumplists will appear over each icon if you click and drag your mouse over the icon. These jumplists show you the files you have recently opened and use most often (as well as any others that you wish to pin permanently to the jumplist).

Libraries: Now Windows will aggregate all of a certain type of file (e.g. music) from all the folders on the OS and place them all in a central “library” where they can all be accessed in a single place by the user.

XP Mode: If you’re a business, or just have a hankering for stuff that runs on XP but won’t on Windows 7, you can run a virtualized form of Windows XP, just make sure your hardware supports it (you will have to a virtualization-capable CPU).

Now on the Apple side of things, the company has tried to steal some thunder from the Windows 7 release. On Tuesday, Apple released a slew of hardware updates to their Mac lineups. The desktop Mac computer, the iMac, will be offered in two flavors: a 21.5″ screen and a 27″ screen. The new Intel Lynnfield CPUs will be in both the new 27″ iMac and the 21.5″. The i7 variants of the Lynnfield CPU is also available in the 27″ iMac. These new Lynnfield processors mark the first foray of Apple into quad-core CPUs in something other than the Mac Pro. I’ll try posting some more stuff about this tomorrow.

For any of you computer aficionados who have already gotten a new Lynnfield Core i7 or Core i5 processors, it looks like there’s some issues with sockets on motherboards made by Foxconn (keep in mind this affects motherboards with Foxconn sockets, which is a wide variety of motherboards, not just those branded under the Foxconn name) with the socket pins not making full contact with the processor. Check out this Anandtech article about it. Although it seems to be mainly an issue with extreme overclocking, there’s some indication that it could be affecting more moderate overclocking as well or even stock frequencies and voltages.

And for those of you who want to know more about overclocking or anything else, shoot me an email at cli@bellevuereporter.com. I’m open to suggestions right now about what direction this blog should go.

Hello everyone!

My name is Changlin Li, I’m a new intern here at the Bellevue Reporter and a senior at Interlake High School. For those of you reading this right now, you can take comfort in the fact that you probably make up over 10% of people who read this blog. Hopefully that number will go a bit lower (you’ll still be just as special, so don’t worry) as time goes on.

As the name implies, this blog will mainly be tech-related. I have the feeling I’ll be sticking in dashes of random musings, but I’m pretty sure that I’ll have to keep that to a minimum. It’s too bad, but I suppose sacrifices must be made.

I got to get a look at Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, the action-adventure game that aims to be the killer app for the Playstation 3, last week when it was displayed at Lincoln Square Cinemas. I’ll be coming out with an article about that soon so I won’t dwell too much on it right now. The game itself just came out yesterday and it suffices to say here that it looks like it could be a major score for the Playstation 3.

I’ll be posting new stuff in the coming weeks so stay tuned!

If you have anything you want to add, you can email me at cli@bellevuereporter.com.