Last month, I was at CTIA Wireless IT, the same day Apple was rolling out new iPods. I walked by the Apple Retail Store on Market St (in San Francisco), and noticed them hauling out the old 3rd-generation iPod nanos.

Only they weren’t the ones that you buy. Rather, they were the giant mock-ups that adorn the outside windows of Apple Stores.

These go to a junk pile… neeedlessly, in my opinion. There are hordes of Mac fanatics that would like to own such a piece of Apple history.

So, to Apple: Sell them on eBay, and put the proceeds to charity. You’ll do a good deed, and a lot of Apple loyalists will have a blast too. Plus, instead of sitting in a landfill, they can sit in someone’s house… like mine.

I’d like to point you to a feedback page, where you can send support for the idea. Unfortunately, Apple does not have a feedback page for their retail stores…

I just sent off my order for a new FON router. Years ago, when FON just got started, I was an early adopter. And, I have to say, FON left a bitter taste in my mouth.

The premise of FON hasn’t really changed, though the terms of service have gotten better. You buy a router on the cheap, pre-loaded with FON’s custom firmware, and then you get to use other people’s FON-enabled connections while roaming. FON makes its money from selling Wi-Fi access to people who aren’t FON members.

It’s a great idea, sure to draw ire from those ISPs that clearly forbid the practice. FON of course is attempting to make theworld’s largest hotspot network, in order to sell the service to people who need an internet connection (and stumble upon the FON hotspot of a particular house/business). Shortly after launch, FON began cutting users in on the revenue… but, at the cost of free roaming. You had to chose if you wanted to make money from your hotspot, or be able to use other people’s FON routers elsewhere.

That’s changed now, you get to roam for free, and collect 50% of the hotspot sales from your router. The other thing that has changed, is FON’s router and firmware… they now both actually work. The first-gen FON firmware locked you out of your LAN… not good.

But, it hasn’t been a smooth ride so far. I couldn’t even order the equipment using Safari… had to start the whole order again in Firefox (Note to FON: Fix your online store so it doesn’t give customers an infinite loop).

Now, am I going to trust FON again with being my router? Heck no… it will be deployed downstream of my router.

Oh, and did I mention I live next to a school now? It will be interested to see if there’s an uptick in usage, from soccer moms and dads checking their email, while waiting to pick up their kids from school. Still, my expectations aren’t that high… I won’t be surprised if nobody uses it at all. But, for $50 (including the extra-range antenna), it’s a nice experiment in merging the worlds of 4G and traditional data networks.

Just when the first article, criticising Microsoft over this was about to fall off the front page… Microsoft did an about face.

If you look at the very-ancient Expert Zone homepage, you’ll now see that Media Center Expert Zone chats have resumed. I’m sure myself, like many others, will enjoy re-re-re-asking key questions… and getting nothing but dead air in response.

But, fear not folks, I’ll be there to ask them yet again.

It’s always funny when two arch-nemesis competitors do the same thing, at the same time. It’s even more funny when one wasn’t prompted by the other.

Anyways, LogMeIn and Windows Live Mesh both updated their Windows clients today. Just run the update check functions for each on the systray.

Oddly enough, neither has posted a changelog… so I have no idea what was improved on either update.

Update: Some have had problems with the October 9th Live Mesh update. Namely, computers aren’t showing up as being available for remote access. This was caused by two problems, and Microsoft fixed the one on their servers. Microsoft now says that if you are still having the issue, restarting the affected PC should fix it.

eBay has gotten rid of the ability to give buyer’s negative feedback at the end of an auction. I held back my dismay from public view… until now.

For the third time, in a single week, I’ve had an international buyer back out due to shipping. They didn’t run the shipping calculator until after purchase. Then, when they realize that shipping from the U.S. is a raw deal for them… they proceed to email me, backing out of the auction.

Now, before this, a bidder backing out was rare. The vast majority were scammers, who were easily identifiable.

I’m not an eBay store. I don’t run an eBay business. I simply use eBay mostly to get rid of the tech junk which I have no use for. This is getting out of hand… because buyers know there’s next to no penalty now for bidding like crazy.

Think about it. The worst that can happen to a buyer now is a non-paying bidder strike. No matter, all they need to do is get about 10 positive feedbacks for eBay sellers to feel at ease. And, NPB strikes wear off much faster than the negative-to-positive ratio of feedbacks.

Why did eBay do this? To triple the value of a listing fee. If you have to re-list an item, you have to pay listing fees all over again. eBay doesn’t care if they have to refund the final auction value two, three, even four times. They still get their cut in the end, now with multiples of the listing fee.

In the end, I think eBay will lose from this. Sellers will be much more hesitant to tack on extras. I used to put Featured Listing ($19.95) on my big-ticket auctions (MacBook Pros, etc)… I sure won’t now. A bidder now has twice the power to back out of a deal, with little-to-no reprisal. I’m going to make sure my listing fees are as low as possible because of that.

So, eBay sellers, enjoy paying listing fees endlessly. Enjoy re-listing items and watching them depreciate in your hands. Google, Google, where for art thou Google?

Microsoft just sent a note to MSN Direct Smart Watch owners. If you update to Windows Live Messenger 9.0 (just hitting beta, but won’t go final until February), you will lose the ability to send messages to your Smart Watch.

In case you didn’t know, Microsoft’s abandoned-but-still-supported Smart Watch platform had has a feature, which, for $20 per year, lets users receive MSN/Windows Live Messenger messages onto their watches. You could get notes from friends, or even message yourself, in unlimited fashion.

In the email, Microsoft notes that they aren’t killing off the feature (yet), you simply need to stay with Messenger 8.5 or earlier on your PC.

Now that I live in a reliable MSN Direct coverage area, I really feel bad that the technology didn’t take off in watches. Cell phone watches are still years off from really being viable (and even then, folks aren’t going to want to use them… mostly). Getting constantly-updated news, weather, sports, stocks, and messaging on the watch was brilliant. And, unfortunately, Microsoft is in a unique position to deliver… carrying both a compact framework for the watch to run on (SPOT) and radio technology (via the MSN Direct network).

And, let’s be honest… MSN Direct for Windows Mobile is nice, but still very immature. It takes much longer to pull up data on a Windows Mobile phone than the Smart Watch. I hope that Windows Mobile 7 integrates MSN Direct service fully into the today screen (the Today Plug-in that is there right now, is a joke).

Effective, well, right now, Comcast has imposed a 250 GB bandwidth cap on your traffic. You no longer can use more than 250 GB per account. That is, unless you haven’t already fired Comcast.

I did that a few months back (first taking a speed hit with AT&T DSL, and then a massive speed boost with local SureWest fiber), and haven’t looked back since. I really could only suggest Comcast at this point, if it’s your only broadband option.

And, I’d also suggest you start to move away from Comcast as your TV provider… vote with your wallet. I will move away just as soon as DirecTV launches either HD TiVo (as in, a modern one with home networking) or Windows Media Center support.

Send a message to internet providers that caps are bad, and will hurt them (much more than us) in the long run.

Yesterday, SureWest came out and deployed the fiber lines. I’m taking a personal day today to bask in its sheer light-refracting glory.

Just to give you some speed rates, I am now getting sustained speeds of 48 mbps down, and 56 mbps upstream. That means that I can email an entire DVD worth of information… in under 15 minutes.

When you start talking these speeds, latency (the response time) comes into question. I am getting about 8 ms over high speed connections.

What does all this add up to? PhoneNews.com loads in less than a second. That’s hot.

These speeds will be used for a lot of technological developments at both PhoneNews.com and MechaWorks. That makes the astronomical bandwidth bill of about $218 per month, a bit easier to stomach. Hey, per megabit that comes to $4.36 per megabit. Comcast charges $54/month for 8 mbps… I’m paying far less per bit.

Oh, and caps? SureWest says they really don’t understand all these ISPs capping left and right. They would love to offer gigabit internet, except Cisco can’t come up with routers and remote terminals fast enough.

As I noted would happen previously, we are now moving from our temporary offices, to our new offices. This process will take the rest of the week, and probably a couple of days into next week.

Unlike the last move however, I will be much more available. Things should go much less unhinged this week.

I had my concerns about the Hauppauge 1212 HD PVR. First, it lost Media Center support (thanks to Microsoft gutting H.264 from TV Pack 2008 at the last minute). Then, it got delayed… a lot.

But, when it comes to capturing HD video, there aren’t a lot of choices out there. A few FireWire boxes touted component in, but they didn’t have the processing power to handle HD video. There are a few cards out there which are cheap, but the ones below the HD PVR’s $249 price tag, suffer from the same video-audio sync issues.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the HD PVR just works. It captures video without trouble, and it puts video on the computer in a state that you can actually edit.

There are a couple of flaws. First, it puts video in the horrific .TS file. I believe that this was due to the chipset that Happuage had to go with to meet the price tag. Thankfully, they include an MP4 converter. Unfortunately though, the MP4 converter botches the header tags… preventing the files from loading in QuickTime (and yes, that includes Apple TV, iTunes, iMovie, and Final Cut). Ouch.

But, there is a quick fix, VisualHub will turn the .TS H.264 file into a H.264, or an (oversized) standard MPEG-4 file, without any trouble. VisualHub is only $24, and considering Amazon.com chops $40 off the retail price, you’re still saving money versus competing products.

Did I mention that it’s the only capture box (with a reasonable price tag) that will capture 5.1 surround sound, in addition to capturing 1080i in H.264? Yeah, that’s hot.

Bottom line: I love my HD-PVR. It lets me capture HD video up to 1080i, without costing me an arm and a leg. Unfortunately, the lack of Media Center support means that it really isn’t going to serve it’s original purpose (of being, well, an HD-PVR), but it does make the best capture device on the market for prosumers.

Room for improvement: Mac support, banish the .TS format, Media Center support (beg Microsoft for an updated TV Pack 2008).

And, to show it in action, here’s my HD PVR capturing an Xbox 360 bug. I took the H.264 TS file, and ran it through VisualHub, converting it to an MPEG-4 on maximum quality.

Xbox 360 Bug (MPEG-4, 26.5 MB)
Buy an HD-PVR from Amazon.com