I purchased the HP LP2475w 24-inch monitor a while back, looking for a nice monitor larger than the 21-inch monitor I had. After a good while of digging around I finally fell for this one, the HP LP2475w.

But as I don’t have any decent hardware stores around where I live/work, I have to really base my decisions on what other people say about the product, and then order it online. Usually not a big deal, but when shopping for a monitor, which is very much a view-to-review type product, it becomes a bit trickier. So actually reaching a decision takes some time.

But the user reviews were great, both “amateur” and “professional” reviews and it seemed like a very good product. The specs looked very good as well, it’s got a whole lotta inputs, no argue there:

• 1 DisplayPort input
• 1 HDMI input
• 2 DVI inputs
• 1 VGA input
• 1 S-Video input
• Component input
• Composite input
• 6 USB inputs
• 1920×1200 Resolution
• 6ms Response time
• 1000:1 Contrast ratio
• 400 cd/m2 Brightness

The viewing angle is fantastic (178h/178v), it’s almost impossible to not see what’s on the screen from any angle. And this monitor is super bright, too bright depending on color settings.

But those colors… No matter what I try, the colors are over saturated. I’m not done fiddling with it yet, but I sort of ran out of time at the time of purchase, so I’ll have to get back on that. It was OK out of the box, but not very good.

Actually, the monitor is fantastic as a gaming monitor. I’ve only tried the Xbox 360 using HDMI on it, no PC games, but it’s very nice.

One thing that bugs me however, is that the USB-ports doesn’t work with my Macbook Pro. There are no drivers for them, which is terrible.

Another thing that’s bugging me is that it’s incredibly slow switching between inputs. Well, maybe not actually switching if you switch manually, but scanning through all inputs. And it doesn’t activate the last used input if it’s active, nor the first active input it finds. No no. It first scans through all inputs before activating any of them. THAT is terrible. Just one of those things that makes you really dislike a product more and more for each time you use it.

All in all, I love the monitor. It’s a great monitor, and I only turn it on and off once or twice a day, so I guess I’ll have to focus on my breathing for a few seconds a day. The monitor looks good esthetically, though it’s pretty thick, but that doesn’t bother me. It’s silent, buttons are OK to navigate, and it’s got PiP (Picture in Picture). I haven’t tried that one yet, I think you can’t use two DVI or DVI/HDMI combination, I think you have to use one VGA or S-Video or something stupid like that. It’s a nifty feature, but I need the screen real estate, so I wouldn’t use it anyway.

I ended up purchasing the Flip Clock (Pic above) and the Night Stand (pic below) app. But the first thing I noticed was that the dimmer function wasn’t actually a dimmer function. What it does instead is just to make the graphics opaque letting more black background through. The screen is still just as bright. Black isn’t black. So it’s still too bright, very annoying. Also, the dimmer function on Night Stand is super buggy. The double tap to dim is very nice — but it doesn’t work. Well, it works once out of a hundred or so tabs.

On the Flip Clock app, the navigation’s all messed up. Muy bugg-o. And the dimmer is not a dimmer, just an opaque-er. And I decided after some usage that having a built in alarm was overkill. I just use the iPhone “repeat daily” alarm. Flip Clock doesn’t have an alarm, Night Stand does. Also, I like the design of Flip Clock better, and it supports the iPhone alarm including snooze, sooo… Flip Clock it is.

All this ranting to come to a completely unrelated point. While reading reviews I come across a comment by some moron saying (in Swedish) “Hey, stop writing comments in English, it only shows up in the Swedish iTunes store!”.

So Mr. Smith moves from Somewhere, CA USA to Sweden because he very much likes to work at the Royal Institute of Technology, he purchases an iPhone, he finds himself an application he likes and feels he wants to contribute with feedback to the nice developers, but oh… oh no!… my god, he doesn’t speak Swedish yet. He was so busy spending 10 years becoming a professor in whatever-ology that he forgot to learn Swedish to please ignorant Swedes!

Or Ms. Mgundu from some obscure country I have yet to learn of seeks refuge from persecution, makes an effort to speak her mind in the only language she masters enough to feel comfortable using making a public comment, and the highly enlightened Swede strikes again.

Ok, all very much not likely, but you get my point. Peoples rush to judgement pisses me off sometimes. Actually, people pisses me off sometimes in general. Stupid people always pisses me off. Obviously, he/she masters the English language enough to understand comments in English. Either that, or he had someone else write up this angry comment for him to post. But that would just be plain stupid. Oh wait, that was my point, he is stupid. He did however follow up with a warm and fuzzy comment and a 4/5 rating. How nice.

English is the second language here, it is beyond “likely” that anyone who owns an iPhone and is browsing the App Store, can understand comments written in English. Maybe he/she wanted to make sure his/her commented was understood by the developers so they can make use of it.

I actually got caught in the whole country catch 22 in the Apple store when I moved back to Sweden from the US. I had a song that the payment didn’t go through for, and when I noticed, I didn’t have the American credit card anymore. Couldn’t pay for it with a Swedish credit card because my account was american, and I couldn’t switch to a Swedish account because I had an unpaid song. Paypal to save the day. See my reasoning? American moves to Sweden + Swedish credit card = Swedish Apple Store riddled with moronic comments.

Unfortunately, my schedule was shifted around, so my plans to have some photos of it, videos and pictures taken with it before I returned it, fell through. But I figured I’d at least share my experience in words.

The first thing I did was to try and use it as a webcam. I failed. This is a USB camcorder, it has no Firewire, so it was not detected as a camera by neither Mac OS x nor Windows XP. I’m no video wiz, so I didn’t know exactly what to expect or how to go about this, but man did I fail. I tried everything, every software out there. Fail.

So eventually I started trying out the camera as it’s intended to be used. I shot some videos. For storage I used the SanDisk Extreme III SDHC Card which did its job well. But the camera… not so well.

I started to shoot some video inside my well lit office, imported it and had a look. The quality was what you would expect for this low budget camera I suppose, which was not well at all. Very grainy video, and there was a very annoying noise, a constant static disturbance in the audio, which was a little surprising. I did expect poor video quality, but not audio as bad as this.

Just for fun, I tried walking outside, beautiful winterland Sweden. Since it was past 2.30 PM it was pitch black (I know, disturbing huh?) and I turned on night mode. Hah! Night mode my ass. All you could hear were my steps crunching snow, and a solid black picture. I walked over to a street light, and it merely showed up as a small dot in the picture.

Since my schedule was thrown over, I never did get a chance to try it outside in daylight, but I’d expect it would be a decent video. However, with the poor audio, I wouldn’t really approve anyway. To Aiptek’s defence, I never checked out any settings for the audio, maybe there is some sort of compression/normalization feature, but I doubt it.

Conclusion: Uh-uh. No thank you sir.

Update: Here are two short clips shot in daylight by Jan Persson (in beautiful summerland Sweden). Looks fine. Hear the audio though? I know it’s outside, but it’s very noisy…

Aiptek z500 hd from Jan Persson on Vimeo.

Aiptek z500 from Jan Persson on Vimeo.

Ok, that was harsh of me. But uTorrent is by far my favorite torrent client for Windows. Very lightweight, rich on features, stable etc. It does its job, and more. Except to exist for Mac OS X.

Other clients like Transmission and Tomato has done a good job of filling the void in my heart, and Transmission did get quite close, but not all the way.

I’ve been trying out the beta release of uTorrent for Mac today and I’m liking it. Stable so far, light and fancy looking. RSS is missing and they say the release may have some “serious bugs”, but they think it’s “stable enough to share”. Well, so far I’m real happy with it. Fancy seeing you.

Go get uTorrent for Mac beta I tell ya!

My spontaneous reaction when launching the new Boxee version is “Wow, the new version of Boxee surely is a massive update”. And the reaction is a very positive one!

The interface has got a major facelift since the previous version release. The design and layout looks much better and is more useful, and maybe even slightly more intuitive. It makes more sense in a way. It also runs better in general. The release comments stated that this new version has some performance improvements, and I do notice them. It feels less laggy, more light in a way. Internet streaming and caching information seems to work better, and I have not yet experienced an application crash like I did a few times with previous release.

But perhaps the biggest news in the new release is the successful integration with the content from the massively popular Hulu.com, a real cool website offering free streaming media of all kinds. Unfortunately, me being in Sweden, this feature is useless to me any anyone else residing outside the US. That being due to the fact that no videos can stream outside the US due to rights management. Hulu have simply not as of yet obtained the rights to stream content outside the United States, at least if you believe their website, which truly shines with its lack of updates. I have sent an email to them today asking about this, begging for at the very least, an update on the matter, but am yet to hear back from them.

There are some bugs, such as when you are running windowed mode, like I do on my computer right now, having it running in the background, it switches over to fullscreen mode every now and then. When a video ends or when you navigate, it simply switches to fullscreen for some reason. The second bug, a more annoying one, is if the internet streamed video is stalling, if the playback catches up to the stream buffer, the video simply stops and sends you back to the screen where you chose the video, instead of pausing and continue playback when the buffer is big enough. The pause method being what one might be used to from say… every streaming video player on the internet?

A third bug, if you can call it that, is that the interface is not built to run on a 4:3 ratio TV/Monitor. I installed the Boxee application on a computer using a standard 21 inch 4:3 monitor, and it looked… well, not good. Videos does not get stretched or in anyway corrupted, just the Boxee interface when you browse the application.

My first impression of Boxee has certainly passed and progressed more into a more aware, thought through evaluation of an application with some true potential. I still feel, for my personal use, the whole community style interaction is overkill. However, the way the application per se is developing, I can absolutely see this as an alternative to Front Row. The only downside to using Boxee would be that I can’t sync my iPod/iPhone to the media, as I can with the Podcasts I download with iTunes and the media I run through it. So for that purpose, it’s not a true winner. But still pretty freaking awesome!

Some other snags you occasionally run into are the feeds not loading properly. Like right now, none of the feeds on the starting screen are loading. Not even “Recently Used” or “Recently Added”, but mostly it’s the other two, “Recommendations” and “Friends Activity” that doesn’t load. As well as some internet streaming feeds, they just throw you an error message saying “Failed to load stream” or something like that.

Just look at those “Public Torrents”! Dick Tracy, Sherlock Holmes etc… They really did go the extra mile, that’s for sure. Built in Torrent client… dang. Just FYI, if you’re planning on using Boxee and its built in Torrent client, you should read up on Port Forwarding for your router, for best performance. I’ve tried some downloads, they’re still downloading, not the speediest of trackers, but yeah… Still Alpha.

The Boxee application is a software application that runs on Mac and Linux, and will also run on Windows machines in a near future. Boxee is a Media Center type app that allows you to browse your local media, as well as network distributed folders and internet streaming media. You can manually add network sources and they will become available under say “Videos” tab if you have video files. But you can also browse per resource, more Finder or Explorer style if you will, to find media in a certain folder or drive.

The internet streaming feature is a cool feature that makes use of PodCast type XML files, the same way iTunes does with PodCasts, and you can watch any stream without having to subscribe to any of them. They’re just there. Although this is a way to simplify things, I can definitely see some issues in the horizon if people start adding their sources to this, as it’s all Open Source. The library can probably grow significantly pretty fast, making it hard to browse. Just like I feel it’s hard to browse my media library using the “Videos” or “Music” tabs. I have to much media available, so it’s better to go via Resources and go straight to whatever resource I’m looking for.

Boxee is in private Alpha testing mode right now, but it’s running surprisingly well for an Alpha app. Although that’s what the software development scene has turned into. A Beta release is more of a 95% functioning application nowadays than a buggy pre-release of the app. Some of the navigation confuses me and is a bit unintuitive, but I suppose one will learn in time by doing, or it might even change. There is an updated version out in a matter of hours of typing this, and I’m no doubt gonna check out that updated version and post any fixes and updates worth mentioning.

The start screen gives you information about what media has been recently used in your account. You can log in with different users, so it’s all personal. It also shows you a stream of recommended media, what your friends are watching and what has been recently added for your within your system or network resources at your disposal. You have your own account where you can add friends as a social network, where you can recommend media and see what others recommends and are watching, if they (and you) choose to share that information. You can also use your last.fm account to listen to music, and share what you are listening to, but my experience with the last.fm plugin is very buggy with failing to retrieve streams and such, but that might obviously improve.

Using the Internet Videos feature is pretty neat and works pretty well. Although the interface is pretty slow and laggy due to the real-time downloading of information, which also occurs when browsing the network resources to some extent. Browsing YouTube or the CNN channel works pretty well and is a really nice feature, and I’m happy they managed to implemented so well. Let’s just hope they crack a way to implement say Hulu streams into this thing. Now I just have to figure out how to get my local 24/7 news web-TV stream in this thing.

The Pictures tab can be a bit confusing. Apple’s Mac OS X is built to make everything easy for the end user. But the back end is not as simple, and when accessing your iPhoto library with Boxee, this becomes an issue. If you look at the above picture you can see the folders iPhoto creates “behind the scenes” if you will, folder that the end user doesn’t see or use normally. But now when browsing for photos, you have to choose between Auto Import, Data, Originals, Contents, Modified and iPod Photo Cache. Well, at least I do. However, you can choose to browse any folder if you have them stored in an orderly fashion under say Pictures folder on yous Mac, so this doesn’t have to be a confusing factor. But hopefully, this will be caught by the Boxee developers and maybe they can hide irrelevant folders by default.

Above you see the Settings screen, which is a pretty rich interface with a lot of options to play around with. I am running the app in window mode right now which is achieved by hitting the Tab key on your keyboard, but it runs natively in fullscreen mode, and it looks really good! Will I be using this instead of Front Row? Ehh. I will no doubt give this more of my time and keep playing around with it. But honestly, I’m not positive I need the whole socializing thing. Actually, for me, that’s overkill and I’d rather be without it. But overall, it does have more features I DO like than Front Row or my Xbox 360. But realistically, if I sit down in front of the TV, I’m looking to watch my media or listen to my music, so personally, I wouldn’t mind sticking with Front Row for that purpose. But that’s in my living room, in the future, when I’m done playing with this app. Well, I still love the internet streaming… Who knows!?

What I would LOVE to see, is a Spotify plugin for Boxee! How awesome wouldn’t that be? You would need to use a keyboard though, since it’s search based… But I’m sure they can make something really useful out of that! The radio feature perhaps?

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.

Read more at Boxee.tv, Boxee Blog, Appletell and CrunchGear

The startup Spotify has really achieved something here. I’m using the Spotify application on my MacBook Pro, and it’s running so smoothly. It’s a very light application streaming music to your computer. It looks very much like iTunes in many ways, only the interface is dark grey. I am using the free account with the invite I got, which is the advertising-funded version of Spotify. So far I’ve heard one third-party ad, and some Spotify ads saying I should get Premium account if I love music as much as they do. Which I might very well do. The ads seem to run with an interval of 20 minutes, and the Spotify ad was only about 10 secs, while the third-party ad was more like 25-30 seconds long. Not bad at all. Oh, as I’m typing this, I just heard two shorter third-party ads in a row.

There is no way to browse music, not by artist, nor by album, songs or genres. It’s all search based Google style, even with spelling suggestions if you get no hits on your search. However, you can get creative with your searches, like they state in their FAQ: “you can search for genres by writing genre: followed by the genre you want to find, like genre:Trip-hop.“. That particular search results in 0 hits though.

I have read some reports from people saying that they are experiencing connection problems with the application, which is to be expected I suppose. It is after all only a few days old. I have however not had any problems at all in the two days I’ve been using it. When connection issues occur, cached music still works. The application caches as much music as you let it cache (up to 100gb) under settings to minimize network strain, which is calculated to run below 256 kbit/s, which means 3G/Turb-3G connections should handle the traffic easily.

The sound quality is nice. Not fantastic, but very good at the very least. They say in their forums, as people asked about this and some had some complaints about the audio sounding “flat”, “We are currently using Ogg Vorbis q5, i.e. up to approx. 160kb/s.“, which seems fair to me.

A bonus feature if you use Growl is a nifty message like this when the song changes, if you change it yourself etc. Beautiful indeed.

It responds to the Play/Pause, Previous and Next buttons on my Apple Wireless Keyboard, which was a surprise, and I think that’s a great feature! However, it does not respond to the Apple Remote Control, which is a real shame, that would have made the experience (for me) far greater, as I have my Mac Mini and iPod at a distance in the office, controlling them remotely. Obviously, it’s a feature outside the norms of delivering a great software application to the general public, but if we’re really lucky, and participate in the forums, we might see it happen.

Some more information about Spotify, which is a Stockholm, Sweden-based company, you can check out this article on TechCrunch and here’s an official video:

Spotify – the story from Spotify on Vimeo.

I just wanted to mention this free piece of software called Par-N-Rar for Windows XP that I tried out today. I was looking to uncompress a large number of RAR archives, located in different folders and to extract the files into their original folder, and finally delete the RAR files. This is what this application does, among other things.

You can also have it idling in the background and uncompress any archives you might add to the location you are monitoring, including all its subfolders, and set an update interval for how often you want it to search for updates in the folder structure. Nifty say I.