Stuff

It has come to my attention today that Société Générale, my bank in France (yes, they of the €5B rogue trader loss), acquired the makers of Moleskine notebooks in 2006 for the not inconsiderable sum of €60M.

Frequent travellers know the right piece of luggage can make or break a trip. Tumi and Hartmann have their rabid fans, as do Travelpro, but the brand I recommend is Briggs & Riley. Their designs may not be the absolute most stylish, but their warranty is by far the best – they will repair any damage, even if it is caused by the airline, no questions asked. Even Tumi does not offer such a warranty, despite the princely prices they charge for their wares.

I just bought a second Baseline 28″ Superlight from Michael Bruno on Market Street near Castro. That hole-in-the-wall shop is the absolute go-to place for Briggs & Riley, and they offer significant discounts over list prices. Most quality luggage is seldom ever discounted, so it is refreshing to get quality service from proprietor Lou Briasco as well as a very nice price (too low to advertise without incurring the wrath of the manufacturer).

When you design remote controls, make them rubberized. The extra revenue you make from selling replacements (when the hard brittle plastic kind inevitably break) does not come close to compensating for the loss of goodwill and the sheer inventory management costs of keeping all those back models in stock.

Home automation units based on X10/Insteon or proprietary systems like Control4 or Savant start at $100-200. At a time when you can buy a fully functional WiFi router with a 200+MHz processor, a minimum 8M of RAM, 16MB of flash for under $50, why is there not a home automation system that costs $50 and uses standard TCP/IP and WiFi for connectivity?

I moved this week-end, and took the opportunity to upgrade from my 32″ 720p Sharp LCD HDTV to a 46″ 1080p 120Hz Toshiba LCD HDTV. As I did basic hookups on Sunday and put in a Blu-Ray disc to test it, I was pleasantly surprised to find out my Toshiba TV’s remote control could drive my Panasonic Blu-Ray player without any programming. This is because the HDMI standard includes, in addition to video and audio, a control channel called CEC.

This is potentially a big win as HDMI should become ubiquitous. CEC is a mandatory part of HDMI 1.3 (but actually having a CEC implementation that does something useful isn’t). As HDMI becomes ubiquitous and consigns analog interconnects to the dustbin of history, we will finally have a control solution that can tie in all the disparate electronics in the typical home theater into a single seamless setup, at least on paper.

Unfortunately, the consumer electronics is doing all it can to muddy the waters. For starters, each vendor insists on maximizing consumer confusion by branding this technology with inconsistent terminology – Toshiba call this Regza Link, Panasonic calls it EZ-Sync. The user interface is also quite inconsistent from device to device. Compare this with how the computer and networking industries managed to create strong unified branding around USB and Wi-Fi. There is yet another digital video standard called DisplayPort, which will presumably be incompatible.

The Toshiba has only 3 HDMI ports and a passel of obsolete analog ports like component video or SVGA. Three HDMI ports are inadequate – I already have 5 HDMI devices waiting to be hooked up:

• Panasonic DMP-BD30 Blu-Ray player
• AppleTV
• Canon HV20 HDV camcorder
• Canon 5DmkII DSLR (awaiting delivery)
• Nintendo Wii (soon)

Toshiba would have been well advised to reduce the number of legacy analog ports instead, specially since they are more expensive than pure digital ports like HDMI, DVI or DisplayPort.