As a GNU/Linux user, I wanted to get an MP3 player that didn't require special "media manager" software to load music. I also wanted a player that could play open formats such as Ogg Vorbis and FLAC. And being a geek, any other nifty features would be nice.
The Cowon iAudio U3 turned out to be the perfect match. Physically, it is about 50% larger than an average USB drive in each dimension. It has 2GB of storage, and mounts as USB Mass Storage. For an MP3 player of this size, it packs an amazing feature set.
It can play MP3, WMA, WAV, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC audio files. It can view MPEG videos (transcoded with very specific settings). It can view JPEG images. It can read plain text files up to 240KB. It can receive FM radio. It can record to WMA at 32, 64, 80, 96, or 128 kbps from a surprisingly sensitive internal microphone, a stereo line-in port next to the headphone port, or from the FM radio. It can wake up at a pre-programmed time as an alarm clock, or to record a radio program and then shut off afterwards. And like a true geek's MP3 player, everything is customizable. You can change the wallpaper of the Now Playing screen, twiddle a generous handful of often useful audio enhancers, switch between a standard folder browser and an iPod-style "Music Library".
But you probably knew all that already from the specs. What you're probably curious about is the audio quality, and how well all those dozens of features work. As to audio quality, it is amazing from a non-audiophile's (my) perspective. Twice, I have crisply heard the backup singers in songs that I didn't even know had any. The audio is very rich, and the enhancers (especially the "BBE", which purports to recreate harmonics that lossy encoding throws out) can help if used in moderation.
The video feature is absolutely awesome to see on such a small player, but it has some limitations. The video is transcoded to 160x128 at 15 FPS (or less), and the audio is transcoded to 128 kbps CBR MP3. So it's going to be a little skippy, and the audio will be decent but not crystal-clear. The actual performance of the video on the player is so-so; video converted with Cowon's proprietary JetAudio software plays swimmingly (although I've only tested a few videos), but video converted with mencoder can easily hang the player.
The JPEG feature seems to work well; I only tested it with the included demo images. It can show images one at a time, or in a 3x3 grid, and can zoom in to the center of an image (but not scroll around inside it). Images loaded relatively quickly, but bear in mind that I was viewing images provided by the manufacturer.
The text feature works great; it's even got the ability to jump to a certain line in the file. There's not much to say about it, but it works while you're playing music, and displays a generous seven lines of tiny text. It doesn't do word wrap, only "character wrap", but I've written a small C program to "pre-wrap" text files.
The FM radio is okay; the reception is not great, and the tuning is slow until you have presets programmed (there's no way to enter a frequency, nor jump by anything larger than 0.1 MHz). The FM recording works as advertised, up to 128 kbps WMA, and starts without an appreciable delay. It would have been nice to see a feature like the Archos Ondio, where recording starts "5 seconds ago" by keeping a 5-second buffer, but that would, of course, eat more power.
The voice recording is great. The encoding goes up to 128 kbps WMA, which is quite good. The default is 32 kbps, which is a little muffled; I recommend at least 64. Most importantly, though, the microphone is excellent. It is astoundingly sensitive, to the point where it's important not to touch the player during recording, since moving your fingers along it will make loud "whoosh" noises in the recording. I haven't tested it, but the player offers a voice-activated recording feature. Combined with the high bitrate, it makes for a much more useful voice recorder than most MP3 players offer.
I haven't tested the line-in recording, but, as it uses the same encoder as the FM and voice recording, and has a direct connection to the input, I would expect that it would work just as well. The player has an "Auto Sync" feature that will automatically split tracks at silent points.
One notable feature is Bookmarks; during playback of any audio or video file, you can navigate to the root of the file browser, enter a "virtual" folder called Bookmarks, and select "(Add Current Point)". Then, you can return to that point instantly by going back to bookmarks. A couple of quirks: all bookmarks for a file are listed under the same name, so marking chapters in audio books is probably impossible; when returning to bookmarks in video files, the image may not display until the stream reaches a keyframe, which could take up to 2/3 of a second.
Now for the subjective things. The player itself is nicely designed; it's all plastic -- mostly black, with a stripe of chrome trim around the edge. It isn't the kind of thing that's going to look dorky. The interface is usable, although it will work better for geeky types who seem to have an inborn leg up in understanding new gadgets; the high-res color screen certainly helps by allowing iAudio to display large, unabbreviated menus and comfortable directory listings. The joystick makes for a much better UI than just a set of buttons; it is somewhat stiff when pushed in, but pleasantly soft when pushed up, down, left, or right. Having two separate jacks (headphone and line-in) next to each other can be confusing, but the benefit of not sharing one jack is that you can listen to the radio as you record it, and know when to start and stop recording.
A few complaints: It should record in formats other than WMA. MP3 would be more practical (there's a bigger market) but would probably require license fees; Ogg Vorbis would be great, but less practical. It should allow the user to play music while it's plugged in to the computer. (You can, but only if you turn off the USB driver on the computer so that the computer ignores the player.) The "Add to Dynamic Playlist" shortcut (you can assign it to a long press of the Menu or Record buttons) should work in the file browser (it only works while you're at the Now Playing screen, which is pretty useless). It is also a little skimpy on accessories; I would expect it to come with a simple protective case and/or a wrist strap, as well as an AC adapter.
Overall, this is a great MP3 (and Ogg Vorbis!) player, but it's probably best for geeky types who will appreciate and use all of the features and be able to work around the quirks. For just under a hundred and forty dollars for 2 GB, it compares favorably with the Creative Zen V Plus (which has a similar but smaller feature set) and the iRiver Clix (which has a larger screen but costs thirty dollars more).
Buy the Cowon iAudio U3 2 GB MP3 Player at Amazon.com
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After my old laptop, an Asus M2400Ne broke, I had to get a new one. Since
the mobile Intel Core 2 Duo processors (Merom) had just come out, I wanted to
get a laptop with one. I bought the Dell Inspiron e1405, and installed Gentoo
Linux on it.
The specs of the system I bought are:
- Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 processor (dual core, 2.0 GHz, 667 MHz FSB, 4 MB L2 cache)
- 2 GB 533 MHz DDR2 SDRAM (2 DIMMS)
- 120 GB 5400 RPM SATA hard drive
- 8x DVD+/-RW dual layer optical drive
- 14.1" WXGA+ (1440x900) "TrueLife" (glossy coated) LCD
- Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator 950
- Integrated 10/100 Ethernet
- Integrated Conexant modem
- Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 WiFi card (802.11a/b/g)
- Dell Wireless 355 Bluetooth module (2.0 + EDR)
As to the system itself, it is reasonably well built. It's not a tank, and
it's definitely a notch below the Latitude notebooks (which have the same
internal hardware but more solid cases), but it is reasonably solid.
The display is amazing. Some people don't like the glossy coating, and I
admit it can cause glare in a room with bright lights, but under most
conditions it is absolutely beautiful. The dimmest brightness level on this
display is a little dimmer than the brightest on my old laptop, and despite
some complaints that there is a light leak near the bottom, I haven't seen
such a problem.
The keyboard is decent. I liked the arrangement of the editing keys on my
Asus better (they were in a column going down the right side of the keyboard:
Home-PgUp-PgDn-End). The touch of the keyboard is on the mushy side of what I
find comfortable. The touchpad is a Synaptics touchpad, with multiple finger
detection. The two buttons are a little mushy, but I rarely use them, opting
instead for tapping on the pad itself or, more often, using the keyboard.
The graphics are ho-hum, but you should be expecting this, because they're
integrated graphics. I'm not a gamer, and I wanted a smaller machine with more
battery life, so I was happy with this. If you play a lot of games, you should
upgrade to the Inspiron e1505, which is Dell's 15.4" version of this laptop.
The speakers are quite nice for laptop speakers. They are still somewhat
lacking in bass, as most laptop speakers are, but they have good midrange and
decent bass, instead of okay midrange and no bass like my previous laptop. I
haven't had any problems with the integrated sound card, and I would recommend
skipping the "HD Audio" upgrade, as it is entirely software and unlikely to do
much to improve the sound.
The battery life is pretty awesome, especially if you opt for the 9-cell, 85
WHr battery, which I strongly recommend. It ranges widely depending on the
power management settings you use, and how much CPU power you use. If I'm doing
something computationally heavy, like compiling software, I will get 2 or 3
hours of battery life. (This might not sound like much, but the processor is
insanely fast--it built Firefox 2.0 in 22 minutes, 6 seconds!) If I turn the
brightness down, slow the CPU, spin the hard drive down, and turn off WiFi and
Bluetooth, I can get close to 8 hours of battery life, and easily 6 hours.
The second half of this post will detail my experience installing Gentoo
Linux on the Dell Inspiron e1405:
Rather than giving you a huge list of everything I did to the system after
getting it, I will simply list any pertinent information about configuring each
component.
Processor: Use the speedstep_centrino module.
Hard drive: Shows up as /dev/sda. Use the ata_piix
driver.
Optical drive: Shows up as /dev/sr0. Uses the same driver as
the hard drive. If you're using a kernel older than 2.6.18, be sure not to
build the IDE/ATAPI driver for this chipset, because it will claim the optical
drive before the ata_piix driver does, and DMA won't work, so the
drive will be hellishly slow and the system will practically hang while
reading or burning lots of data.
Touchpad: Use the psmouse driver in the console, and the
synaptics driver for X.org. You might want to turn the speed up
a little, since it seems sluggish by default.
Ethernet: Use the b44 driver.
Modem: Untested. Sorry. I think that buying the Conexant drivers from
LinuxAnt might work.
WiFi: Use the ipw3945 driver. It's in Portage, as
net-wireless/ipw3945.
Bluetooth: Use the hci_usb driver.
Graphics: Use the intel-agp and i915 kernel
modules, and the i810 X.org driver. You'll need the
915resolution utility to add the native 1440x900 resolution to
the mode table. If you want native 1440x900 resolution in the console, you
can do the following:
- Using a Gentoo-patched kernel, such as
gentoo-sources, build
the vesafb-tng driver as a module.
- Add the
915resolution service to the boot
runlevel.
- Create a new init script,
/etc/init.d/fixvideo, containing the
following:
depend() {
after 915resolution
before consolefont xdm
}
start() {
modprobe vesafb-tng mode=1440x900-32;
}
- Add the
fixvideo service to the default runlevel.
When the system boots, it will start in the default 640x480 mode, patch the
mode table with 915resolution, and then load the
vesafb-tng module when fixvideo starts.
If the graphics don't come back on after you have closed the lid, you need
to add the following to /etc/acpi/default.sh, after the first
;; after power):
lid)
if grep open /proc/acpi/button/lid//state > /dev/null; then
vbetool dpms on;
else
vbetool dpms off;
#xset dpms force off
fi
;;
This works for me.
Sound: Use the snd-hda-intel module. I recommend installing
the latest versions of the alsa-* packages, since the HD Audio
drivers are constantly being updated.
This is all I can think of in terms of how to get Gentoo working on this
laptop. If you're having trouble with something, or I forgot to explain
something, feel free to drop me an email.
Note: I installed the x86 version of Gentoo on this machine, even though it
could support the x86_64 (a.k.a. amd64) architecture as well. On the Gentoo
Wiki there is a description of
how to install
Gentoo AMD64 on the Inspiron e1405. I have tried installing it, but I ran
into a showstopping problem where, unless I disabled ACPI (which is important),
it hung when I closed the lid.
Related: TuxMobil Linux Laptop and Notebook Installation Survey.
A while ago, I picked up an Earthmate GPS LT-20 for my computer. It
is intended for use with a computer; it has only a USB cable and a status
LED, and is actually quite small. This means you can't take it with you
hiking or anything.
Performance: The first thing I noticed about the LT-20 is
how long it takes to get a fix. Reviews of the LT-20 usually omit the "warm
fix" measurement, or the amount of time it takes to get a fix when it is
powered on in the same exact place it was before. This is because the LT-20
lacks any memory of the last place or time it was used, and thus has to "start
from scratch" each time you turn it on. This can be a bit of a pain, because
it can take from two to five minutes to get the first fix.
Beyond that, the performance is okay. It very occasionally drops the fix
for a few seconds, and a little more often (maybe a few times per hour) it
will drop to a 2D fix. As it is a low-end GPS, the LT-20 has no provision for
an external antenna, so all of these judgements were made with the GPS next to
the window of the car. The accuracy of the GPS is again pretty good; I'm not
very familiar with the expected accuracy of civilian GPS, but it seemed pretty
good.
Linux compatibility: Being a Linux user, I ignored the
included copy of StreetAtlas 2006 and tried to get the GPS working with Linux.
With a little fiddling, I discovered how to get it to work:
- Build the
cypress_m8 kernel module and load it.
- Plug in the GPS.
- Check if
/dev/ttyUSB0 exists. If it does not, run
mknod /dev/ttyUSB0 c 188 0
- Run
cat /dev/ttyUSB0 and check that you can see some NMEA
sentences come in.
- Run
gpsd -f /dev/ttyUSB0 -n.
Now you should be able to use any gpsd-enabled apps with your GPS. This was
surprisingly easy to set up. Unlike the previous EarthMate GPS (not the
LT-20), this one uses real NMEA over a USB-to-serial converter, rather than a
proprietary binary protocol.
Linux apps: As the LT-20 is very small and easy to hook
up, it makes a great GPS for wardriving. On long car trips, I always have it
plugged in with gpsd+kismet logging access points. It's also useful with
gpsdrive for car navigation (the original, intended purpose of it), although
you should know that gpsdrive, being open-source and lacking the access to
commercial street maps that DeLorme and other companies have, doesn't give
quite the same experience. It doesn't do turn-by-turn directions, but it puts
you on the map and allows you to download maps from a handful of websites.
Conclusion: I would recommend the Earthmate GPS LT-20 with
reservations: if all you need is a simple GPS for wardriving--that is, as a
computer peripheral--then the LT-20 will fill that need cheaply. But if you
need high accuracy, quick fixes, a portable unit, or on-board navigation, it's
not for you.
Related: Navigation/GPS page at Tuxmobil.org. Tuxmobil is a site about Linux and Unix on mobile
computers, and related hardware and software.
Buy the Delorme Earthmate GPS LT-20 at Amazon.com
and help pay for my hosting!
