A cheap motion wheel beats a pricey rig for casual racers.
Hanselman, who calls himself a casual gamer and not "a big racer", bought the
wireless speed wheel for about $30 online. He contrasts it with the roughly
$200 bolt-down force-feedback wheel and with steering by hand in front of the
Kinect, neither of which he wanted.
The steering tracks accurately and the unit feels solid.
It is a pair of handlebars held in the air that senses motion "just like a
gyroscope in a cell phone". In his Forza Motorsport demo he calls it "almost
creepily good". He notes its heft, the lights on top, that it is wireless and
that it runs on two batteries.
It replaces the standard controller for the whole session.
Big gas and brake buttons, a full d-pad and the usual buttons mean menus can
be navigated without picking up a regular controller. It also shakes on
impact; he hit a wall in the demo. His verdict: "there is no better thirty
dollar controller" for driving games, and more fun than the standard Xbox 360
controller.
Scott HanselmanRemote Pan Tilt Zoom of a Logitech BCC950 Conference Cam using .NET, SignalR, WPF and Windows Azure
A remote worker needs to steer the office camera himself.
Hanselman works from Portland, Oregon for a company in Seattle. His office
holds a Logitech BCC950 conference cam on a kiosk that answers his Lync calls
automatically and goes full screen, so visitors see his face. Its colour shows
whether he is busy.
Standard camera APIs plus a cloud relay give remote control.
He controls the BCC950's pan, tilt and zoom through the standard DirectShow
APIs, first from a console app driven by the keyboard. He then sends commands
through SignalR, which he describes as a real-time, socket.io-like tool using
WebSockets, hosted on Azure. The controls are a small app with a transparent
background that floats over the Lync video, so they look built into the chat
program.
The result lets him look around the office from home.
In the demo he pans the Seattle camera from Portland, and the motor is
audible over the speakerphone. He zooms in and out on whiteboards. He says the
code is on GitHub and should work with the same camera over Lync, Skype or
another client. He thanks Rafael Rivera, Damian Edwards and David Fowler for
help with the code.
Scott HanselmanEXAMPLE: Wedding Dance Video in Windows Live Movie Maker
The clip is a music-only sample with no spoken content. The 32-second caption track holds only a music tag and fragments of song lyrics, consistent with the title's example wedding dance video made in Windows Live Movie Maker; it makes no argument and gives no detail about the tool or how the video was made.
Scott HanselmanRaw First Look and Live Realtime Unboxing of the Microsoft Touch Mouse for Windows 7
Microsoft's retail packaging is finally getting good. Opening the box, the speaker reads it as Microsoft "starting to get their act together" on the retail experience, citing a magnetic flap that snaps shut and a box that lifts to present the mouse.
The hardware feels solid and installs instantly. The mouse ships with batteries and BlueTrack technology, which he says "apparently" works on glass, plus a tiny nano receiver; he calls it heavy rather than light. On plugging in the receiver, Windows found the mouse right away and popped up a short video explaining how to use it.
Multi-finger gestures drive window management, which he likes. Following the tutorial on screen, he shows one finger to scroll and pan, the thumb to move through content, and two fingers up to maximize a Notepad window, with two-finger down, left and right gestures as well. Three fingers up he likens to Exposé and calls "kind of cool".
Scott HanselmanEagletrom Trackerpod controlled with C# 4 and ASP.NET MVC w
No summary available: this video has no speech.
Its 34 seconds of audio are mechanical noise and YouTube has no captions
for it, so the transcript is empty; going by the title, it shows an
Eagletron TrackerPod controlled with C# 4 and ASP.NET MVC.
Scott HanselmanCisco Umi Telepresence Test - more than a webcam
Umi's motion is far smoother than a webcam's. On a live call with Damien, connected over HDMI on a 3.5-megabit link at what they take to be about 1080p, the speaker calls the frame rate "ridiculous"; Damien likens it to hooking up a video camera and having it remoted.
The picture is grainy, which the speaker blames on lighting. The speaker says anyone imagining "super HD" telepresence will be let down, and guesses a fluorescent-lit Microsoft office with white walls would look much clearer; the clip ends as Damien moves to another room so they can compare.
The caption track carries no summarizable content. For this 106-second clip the auto-captions are four words, "foreign thank you foreign": a "thank you" between two tags for speech the captioner didn't transcribe. Nothing in them says what Taimanao or anyone else says or does.
Scott HanselmanSpaceTec SpaceOrb 360, an Arduino, an OrbShield to play Half Life 2 on Windows 7 x64
The SpaceOrb 360 is an under-respected shooter controller stranded by age. Hanselman calls the roughly 20-year-old device, with six axes and six buttons and steered like a stand-in for your head, "the greatest controller ever created for first-person shooters"; it was an RS-232 serial device that only worked in DOS-era games such as Quake and Descent.
The OrbShield revives it as a driverless USB input device. A hobbyist named Vic, posting on a message board, built the OrbShield, a kit that sits on an Arduino and converts the SpaceOrb's serial output to a USB HID device; Hanselman demos it on a 64-bit Windows 7 machine with no drivers installed.
Uploading a different sketch changes what the Orb pretends to be. In joystick mode he shows XYZ axes, rotation and all 16 buttons, reached by pressing button combinations; since most games do not support a joystick, he then uploads a "WASD" sketch that makes it a keyboard and mouse.
Keyboard-and-mouse emulation removes per-game binding. The mappings are short, mostly copy-paste Arduino programs, which he says he managed without knowing how to program an Arduino; he then plays Half-Life 2 with forward movement, turning, looking and circle-strafing without setting any in-game bindings.
The kit is a modest solder job with free software. Hanselman says it took him about an hour and a half to solder three resistors, two diodes, a chip, a DIP switch and the serial and USB connectors, and the software is a free download from Vic.
A new bicycle wheel is unboxed, fitted and ridden. The 51-word caption track is mostly music: one speaker asks what the new wheel is for ("for my bicycle"), the parts are fitted by their R and L markings for the right and left sides, and the clip ends on the ride with "Don't let go" / "I won't let go". The track says nothing about how the wheel performs.
Scott HanselmanI am Diabetic. Here's how it works. My insulin pump and continuous glucose meter (CGM).
Managing diabetes is like holding a plane at steady altitude.
Hanselman says his pancreas produces no insulin: eating pushes his blood
sugar up, insulin brings it down, and the goal is to neither crash nor float
away. Shots would mean 8 to 10 injections a day, so he uses an insulin pump
that allows small, frequent adjustments.
The pump is worn constantly and rebuilt by hand every few days.
Every 3 days he removes the cannula, rewinds the pump, fills a fresh
reservoir, primes new disposable tubing and inserts a new needle; he uses
about 30 units of insulin a day and takes the pump off only for a few minutes
to shower. He says pumps cost a couple of thousand dollars, are usually paid
for by insurance only after a fight, and are out of reach for many people
outside Western countries.
A continuous glucose meter gives frequent readings, but dosing stays his call.
After 15 years of pricking his finger 8 to 10 times a day, he shows a sensor
that samples interstitial fluid rather than blood every 5 minutes and sends
readings to the pump; he replaces it about every 36 hours. He still decides
each dose himself, "sometimes Microsoft Excel", and confirms it on the pump
(two units in the demo).
Diabetes means hurting yourself now to avoid harm later.
He points to bruises from "putting holes in myself faster than I can heal
them" and to the stream of needles and medical waste each change produces,
plus the cost of the disposables.
He made the video to ask for research money.
At 36 he says he can handle the routine, but asks viewers to imagine a child
of three, or an infant, doing it 24 hours a day. He asks for donations to the
American Diabetes Association, for which he was personally fundraising, with
the money going to medical research.
Microsoft's free SEO Toolkit plugs into the existing IIS manager.
Hanselman, a Microsoft employee, presents the IIS team's newly released
Search Engine Optimization Toolkit 1.0 as a free download for IIS7 (from
iis.net) that runs inside the same IIS manager developers already use, with
site analysis, sitemap editing and robots.txt management.
It spiders a site like a search engine and reports violations.
In his demo it crawls his blog; an earlier full run found 51,000 links and
sorted problems into SEO, content (invalid markup, duplicate titles, very
large pages) and performance (slow pages, many resources, heavy script).
Violations can be filtered to errors only, and each comes with a
plain-English explanation of the problem and how to fix it.
Crawl results form a queryable database that developers can extend.
He shows ad hoc queries over the stored crawl (for example content length
greater than 15,000), comparison against earlier reports to track
improvement over time, and says developers can add their own validations,
custom tasks and reports.
Scott HanselmanReview: Eye-Fi Wi-Fi SD Card for wireless uploads from any digital camera - Demonstration
The card uploads each photo moments after it is taken.
Hanselman shows a 4 GB Eye-Fi SD card with built-in Wi-Fi in an ordinary
Fujifilm point-and-shoot (he puts the camera at $200 and stresses the camera
is not the point); each shot appears on his Windows machine via a tray
notification within seconds, and a burst of shots saves and uploads at the
same time.
Small desktop software routes uploads, even to a network drive.
He says a little program on his Windows machine receives the photos and is
set to save them to his network drive rather than locally, which he says
costs some speed.
He reports it trouble-free and plans to use it everywhere.
He says he has had no problems with it at about 60 feet from the Wi-Fi access
point, calls it "amazing" at $50, and says he intends to switch all his SD
cards to it.
Scott HanselmanCarl Franklin sings "The Joker" on Malmö, Sweden at The Bis
A live song performance, with no argument to summarize. The title has Carl Franklin singing "The Joker" in Malmö, Sweden; the 103-word caption track holds only fragments of the lyrics, partly mangled ("Some people call me cowboy"), with no talk or commentary.
Scott HanselmanKindle 2 and Kindle for iPhone Short Video Review
The Kindle 2's screen and build beat the original. Hanselman cites 16 shades of gray, a body "about the width of a pencil", 3G, and an on/off switch on top replacing the original's two side buttons. He says page refresh is faster, roughly the 20% Amazon claims, though "sometimes it feels the same".
The bezel is far too big for the screen. He calls the white border around the display "ridiculous" and says there is "no reason in this day and age" for it: the screen should run to the edge, or the device should shrink.
Kindle for iPhone syncs your place across devices. He shows Whispersync: he pages ahead in a David Sedaris book on the iPhone app, syncs, and opens the same purchased book on the Kindle at the same chapter. He is unsure why he would read on a phone, but suggests short waits, such as for car repairs.
The new charging cable is the worst change. The Kindle 2's cord is "not mini USB", unlike the original Kindle's, so he has to carry and keep track of one more cable. He also misses the original's scroll roller and finds the new five-way joystick, which you click in to select, unintuitive.
At $359 it is an expensive toy. He is "generally pretty happy" with it but says it would be "a winner" at $200, and calls it "the Kindle 1.5".
Scott HanselmanMimzy using Baby Sign Language (ASL) to sign Cracker
A 14-second home clip, not a software video. The captions hold only an adult repeatedly prompting a child to "sign cracker" and "show me cracker", ending in "yay". The signing the title describes is visible only on screen, so the text adds nothing beyond the title.
A home clip of a small child, with no argument.
The 55-word caption track is mostly music tags around a toddler saying "hi",
"Daddy" and "bye-bye", while an adult asks "are you on the phone?" and "who
are you calling?"; it carries no software or AI content to summarize.
A home video of a child riding a toy train, not a tech talk. The 103-word transcript is one adult voice coaching a child to sit down and drive around the track with both feet, keeping a second child off the track; it ends with a trailer that "won't work" because it is missing a hook.
The camera's appeal is that it has almost no controls. On the Pure Digital Flip Ultra, Hanselman shows one big red record/stop button plus trash, play and volume up/down, and says there is "only one setting, and the setting is awesome": 30 frames per second at 640x480, roughly a 4-megabyte-per-second bit rate as he states it, MP4-compressed AVI files.
Getting video off the camera needs no cables or installs. A pop-out USB connector plugs into a PC or Mac, and the camera mounts as a drive. Its internal 2 GB storage carries bundled software for basic editing and uploading to YouTube.
He rates its low-light performance and auto exposure highly. He demonstrates it in darkness, low light and bright light, and says it handles white balance itself so footage "comes out correctly exposed".
He recommends it outright, especially for casual web video. It costs about $140. He bought the white model as a birthday present for his wife, says it weighs next to nothing and comes with a carrying pouch, and urges viewers to buy one.
His only complaint is that his game console couldn't play its files. His Xbox lacked the codec when he plugged the camera in, which he calls "a small beef". The camera also has a standard RCA composite TV-out for direct playback on a TV.
The clip has no argument or spoken content to summarize. Its 34-second caption track holds only music tags and fragments of the word "happy", consistent with someone singing the title's song; it names no speaker and makes no claims.
Dictation beat his own typing speed on a typing test.
Hanselman takes a typing-test program's passage by voice recognition and
scores 125 words a minute at 88.9% accuracy, which he says is "about double
what I type".
Punctuation and fixes are spoken, not typed.
He dictates "comma", "period" and "new paragraph" aloud, and corrects
misrecognitions by voice mid-test: "pray" respelled letter by letter as
"p r e y", and "die" corrected to "diet".
No summary available: this video has no speech.
Its audio track is silent for the full 17 seconds and YouTube has no
captions for it, so the transcript is empty; going by the title, it is a
demo of DeskSpace, a 3D virtual desktop for Windows Vista.
No summary available: this video has no speech.
Its audio track is silent for the full 59 seconds and YouTube has no
captions for it, so the transcript is empty; going by the title, it is a
speed comparison of web browsers on Windows.