Kinoma Notes

If you love great photography — images like they used to print in Life Magazine of old and National Geographic — you will adore The Big Picture.

The Big Picture is a photo blog created by by Alan Taylor for The Boston Globe/boston.com. It’s an always-reliable source for high quality, amazing imagery, with a focus on current events, lesser-known stories and “just about anything that comes across the wire that looks really interesting”.

In the past, beautiful photography was considered a poor fit on mobile, and in fact even the best mobile web browsers don’t do these photos justice.

But Kinoma Play makes it so effortless to zoom in, pan around and “fly though” the amazing detail in these photos that they retain a powerful emotional punch even on devices with smaller screens.

You can find The Big Picture in Kinoma Guide at Pictures & Photocasts > The Big Picture. New photostreams are posted every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

• The Big Picture [Boston.com]

Wil Wheaton is one of my favorite people on teh internets, and recently I’ve learned that he has pretty great taste in podcasts.

Can’t place the name? Wil played Gordie in “Stand by Me”, who got leeches in his underpants and told the epic story of Lard Ass. He played Wesley Crusher in “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, who got leeches in his underpants and saved the day at least seven times.

He’s now a writer, actor and geek who’s married with two stepchildren, has written several books, and sometimes wears sweaters with clowns on them and gets leeches in his underpants (although not simultaneously). He has an excellent blog.

As of today, the podcasts he’s featured in his “Podcasts I Love” posts are available in Kinoma Guide.

• NPR: Driveway Moments — “This ingeniously-named podcast is chosen by listeners from NPR stories that are so compelling, they stay in the driveway when they get home and listen to them until they’re over. Some of them are inspiring. Some of them are funny. Some of them are so sad it’s hard to listen to them. All of them are incredibly awesome…”
• Pseudopod –  A great horror fiction podcast. Wil says, “Some of the stories are very disturbing — this is horror, after all — but I have yet to hear one that’s gory for gore’s sake, or disturbing for the sake of being disturbing. Some of them, like ‘Clockwork’, aren’t even scary; they’re just cool.”
• The Night Air — “Each show combined interviews with music and soundscapes to create something unique and remarkable. I was hooked, and I’ve made countless commutes endurable by leaving my body on the train and letting my mind go wherever The Night Air takes me.”
• Radio Free Burrito — Although this isn’t technically a “podcast he loves”, this is Wil’s very own podcast and certainly deserves a place here.
• 60-Second Science — “Every day, the geniuses at Scientific American spend just one minute sharing something cool and interesting from the scientific world. Their stories are all over the place, too, from planetary science to neuroscience to genetics.”
• Stuff You Should Know — “Kids, learning isn’t just fun, it’s awesome. [This podcast] covers diverse topics like How Moonshine Works, How Cannibalism Works, and How Abandoned Cities Work. [It’s] worth listening to for their amusing interaction as much as it is the fascinating ‘wow, I did not know that’ information they dispense.”

You can find these in Arts & Culture > People > Wil Wheaton — Podcasts I Love right now, and they’ll soon appear individually in appropriate categories as well. Or, just Search > Kinoma Guide to find them.

Enjoy!

Removable memory is pretty much all alike, isn’t it?

We wish! For better or worse, there can be big differences in quality and speed between one storage card and another.

For quality, all you can really do is buy a brand you trust. But for speed, the good news is that there’s now a standard way of classifying the throughput of SD and SDHC cards — the Speed Class.

It’s really easy to understand, too. Class 2 cards guarantee a minimum transfer speed of 2 MB/second, Class 4 cards a minimum speed of 4 MB/second, etc. A card’s Speed Class should be clearly marked as a number in a round “C”, as shown above.

We recommend that you always buy storage cards that are Class 4 or higher, and we normally buy Class 6 cards ourselves.

With a faster card your phone spends less time on data transfers, which translates to more efficient media playback. As an added bonus, copying media between the card and a PC will be faster as well.

• SD Speed Class [SD Association]

The Palm LifeDrive and Palm T|X were introduced in 2005 — ancient history by device standards.

You’d think both devices be hopelessly out of date by now, but they’re still very useful and (with Kinoma Player 4 EX) still make great media players. The LifeDrive’s chubby chassis is pretty dated, but the ahead-of-its-time Palm T|X was clearly the pinnacle of Palm OS device design. The hardware still looks and feels like it could’ve been released this year.

They both have built-in Wi-Fi, which was still pretty unique back in 2005. Sadly, their Wi-Fi support is showing its age, and the LifeDrive and T|X are unable to connect with more and more modern Wi-Fi routers and access points in their out-of-the-box configurations.

The solution

For my D-Link DIR-825, the solution was to go to Setup > Wireless Settings > Manual Wireless Network Setup and choose “Mixed 802.11g and 802.11b” as the 802.11 Mode for the 2.4 GHz band. (You don’t have to worry about the 5 GHz band if your router supports it, since the devices don’t.)

Also, remember that the LifeDrive and T|X only support older WEP and WPA-PSK wireless security modes. I recommend temporarily turning off wireless security altogether, and then turning it back on once you’ve figured out how to get your device to connect to your Wi-Fi network.

Other routers

If you’d like to share specific instructions for configuring other routers, you can email us at content@ our domain and I’ll gladly add the details to this post.