John Wick: Chapter 2(2017)

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Quality : HD
Title : John Wick: Chapter 2
Director : Chad Stahelski.
Writer :
Release : 2017-02-08
Language : English.
Runtime : 122 min.
Genre : Thriller, Action, Crime.

Synopsis :
Movie ‘John Wick: Chapter 2’ was released in February 8, 2017 in genre Thriller. Chad Stahelski was directed this movie and starring by Keanu Reeves. This movie tell story about John Wick is forced out of retirement by a former associate looking to seize control of a shadowy international assassins’ guild. Bound by a blood oath to aid him, Wick travels to Rome and does battle against some of the world’s most dangerous killers.

Toyota Camry Hybrid tire recommendations

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I have a 2012 Toyota Camry Hybrid XLE with 215/55R17 tires that sadly needed to be replaced after 16,000 miles. It came with total garbage on the wheels: Bridgestone Turanza EL400. I did an alignment at 11,000 and rotation at 5,10,15K.

I had a hard time finding good information, so I’m hoping this can be THE place for Camry owners to discuss it. I really wanted to learn about MPG experience with different tires, but reviews I read from actual Camry owners just weren’t very helpful. Consumer Reports has three tires that they have rated as Excellent in the Rolling Resistance category and in the top half of their tire type:

  • Michelin Primary MXV4 (H-rated)
  • Dunlop SP Sport 7000 A/S (H-rated)
  • Michelin Energy Saver A/S

Reading online reviews at tirerack.com and consumerreports.com, the MXV4-H seemed to be the best. (The MXV-4 V-rated is more expensive and has more rolling resistance and wears faster.) I bought some on January 25, 2013 and will be reviewing them over time.

If you have tested different tires with a fuel economy bias, please comment. If you have your own MPG tests using the MXV4-H, comment here.

Dell Optiplex SFF All-in-One Stand information (FDXW3)

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I had a client interested in the Dell Optiplex 7010 Small Form Factor All-in-One stand, but I had a tough time finding out any information about it. I bought two and here’s what I’ve learned:

  • The new one I just bought in 12/2012 is 73DH9 (073DH9) and it may be the same as FDXW3 (0FDXw3)
  • I know this one is made for the Optiplex 7010, but I read that it should work with 990, 790, 390 (SFF only, of course).
  • Here’s a very good source of pictures or here is Red Planet Trading’s cache of photos.
  • It will only work with Dell monitors with their special “clip-in” system, such as the 1908FP or P190S.
  • This stand will handle up to 13.2 lbs (6 kg).

Here is a better picture showing the monitor mount:

And here is what it looks like if you remove that metal piece and put it against a 10 CM x 10 CM VESA mount screw holes:

Here are the fancy instructions (click to enlarge):

Review of the Garmin nuvi 205W GPS

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After my ordeal with the TomTom XL 330, I wanted to find a good upgrade to my Garmin c320.  I wanted coordinates and Where Am I? features in particular.

I hope Garmin reads this, I could help them sell millions more.

PROS:

1. Best routes.  (See my cons)  This may be one of the main reasons Garmin dominates in the US — good routing.  Of course, I wish it had more a brain and could think about traffic lights and general traffic in certain areas at certain times (not actual traffic reporting), but I guess needing brains is good.

2. Where Am I?  (See my cons) This will list your nearest street address.  In this screen it also shows altitude and your coordinates.

3. Easier broad map access.  On my c320, you had to dig in the menus to find a broad map view, so you could touch areas on the map and go to it.  On the 205w, you can just touch the map while driving and it will take you to the broad map.  You can then touch an area that you want to make a Via Point and change your route that way.

4. Speed Limit sign.  You can set it up to show the current speed limit on the screen.  It has been super accurate to the instant of a speed limit change in real driving.  If the sign is missing on the screen, you also then know that it doesn’t really know how to calculate arrival time from the road.  You may want to use that information to take or avoid that road on your next trip.

5. Very compact.  My c320 was much bigger, so this is super small.

CONS:

1. Touchscreen.  This may change as I use it, but the touchscreen is no where near as sensitive as my c320.  It requires some hard touching.  It also shows fingerprints much worse than my old GPS unit.

2. Ball mount.  This gives a better range of motion than the mount on my c320, but it feels like I need to push really hard on my GPS unit to get it to snap in.  This may change in age, too.

3. Keyboard speed.  When I’m typing in a city, street, etc., the keyboard is a full QWERY keyboard, which is an improvement over my c320, but there are two things I don’t like: 1) there is a delay from when you type to when it shows, so if you type fast, you can’t see what you’re typing, if you make a mistake, you don’t see if very fast; 2) the spacebar is tiny and way off to the right, while dumb menus are in the bottom middle — very annoying!!

4. Charging cord.  On my c320, the charging cord would plug into the mount and there wasn’t a charge jack in the GPS unit itself.  This was nice because you could leave the power cord in the mount all the time and take the GPS with you – you never had to plug in, just clip the GPS in and out.  Now, the power cord won’t stay put and it falls out the door, etc because it must be plugged into the back of the GPS.  I suppose with the mount the way it is, it’s not possible to have a jack in the mount and GPS, but I think they should work on that.

5. Current road.  The TomTom XL 330 did show what road you are currently on and what the next road to turn onto was.  Garmin only shows the next road name.

6. Routing pet peeve.  Sometimes I won’t want to take its routing because I know of a better way.  Let’s say I turn off of the normal route — it will recalculate and have a shorter time than before I turned.  What’s up with that?  Why didn’t it take me that way to begin with?

6. Routing choices.  I don’t like the fact that I can choose either Fastest Time or Shortest Route.  I would imagine that much of the time, the best route would be in between those to extremes.

7. Missing POIs.  There are just so many cases where I’ll be looking for something and it’s not in the Garmin — even for stores and restaurants open for years.  I know you’ll have this will all GPS units, but for the #1 seller in the US, can’t they figure out a way to get the users involved?  How about incentives for users to fix problems online and give them discounts on map updates?  If you have the best maps and POIs by far, why would anyone buy any other company?

8. Tinny speaker.  I’m not impressed with the speaker, it is much worse sounding than the deep c320, but you can hear it.  It’s just not pleasant.

9. Voice choices.  It would be nice to choose your voice, but I don’t see that option, unless you choose another language.

10. Nearest intersection.  This is within the “Where Am I” place in the menu.   It could be very useful in an emergency to have the nearest intersection in addition to the nearest address.  However, I’ve found that they should have labeled it, “random intersection within a few miles.”  It will generally show me a major intersection, and sometimes ignore dozens of closer small intersections that would be much more beneficial to the police, fire, ambulance, etc.

11.  Volume.  I hate how they have the volume setup.  On the c320 there was a  wheel on the side of the unit — that’s best.  On the TomTom, there was a place on the main driving screen that you touched and then moved the volume slider.  On this 205W, you must hit Menu, Volume, move it, then back, then View Map.  This is just awful.  I want a Mute button on the driving screen and a separate volume button there, too.  This is widescreen after all.  I hope this doesn’t cause accidents, because I think it will.

12. Need customization!  Let me choose 3 shortcut button for the driving map view.  That way I can put Where Am I, Volume, and POI on the main screen.  Please!!  I also want to change my route color to red instead of light purple.

13. POI choices.  This is something I’ve never found a GPS that does this how I want it.  If I’m looking for gas or food, it is usually on a long trip.  If I want to go to fast fast, let’s say (that wouldn’t happen!), I would choose Restaurant, Fast Food.  It will show me all the restaurants by how far they are from me now.  That’s not what I want, so I choose Near…My Current Route.  That’s closer to what I want, but it still shows how far it is from where I am now.  I want it to show me that, but also how far I’d have to deviate from my route.

Overall, this is an excellent unit and I would buy it again because I believe the Pros outweigh the Cons and no competitor and yet beat it.

Please leave me comments on how other competitors stack up on these weaknesses, as I’ve only used Garmin, TomTom, and Microsoft Streets & Trips via laptop.

Review of the awful TomTom XL 330 GPS

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I have a Garmin c320 GPS unit and wanted to upgrade to a model with more features – particularly coordinates and “Where Am I” features.  After reading the reviews, I really liked the features in the TomTom XL 330.  The only hesitation I had was with the speaker volume.  The Amazon reviews showed some buyers that had speaker problems with their units.  There were enough positive reviews to make me buy it.

PROS:

1. Lots of customization.  You can change color schemes, choose your voice, change viewing angles (Garmin c320 & 205W can’t do that).

2. “Where Am I?”  This is far superior than Garmin.  It shows in what City, Township, Municipality, etc. where you are and the nearest address.  This can be very valuable when calling for help.  Garmin only gives nearest address and nearest intersection (which I like to call “some random intersection within a few miles”)

3. Alternative routes.  If you don’t like the route you’re given, you can ask for a new one.  Read more in the Cons.

4. Tons of route control.  You can look through a list of every turn ahead of time and ask it to avoid a certain place.

5. Compact, attached mount.  I didn’t use it, but it was a cool idea.  The mount would detach from the unit or you could leave it on and fold it in.

6. Fixing map errors.  I never got to see this in action, but it sounded really cool.

7. Results as you type.  I loved this feature and will really miss it with my new Garmin 205W.  As you type a street name or city, it will show you the results as you narrow them down.  This can really save time and effort.

CONS:

1. Routing.  (Deal-breaker one)  The routing seemed to have a large bias toward driving on interstates.  It seemed to me that the reason was insufficient non-interstate speed limit information.  For example, I asked the Garmin and TomTom for a route from Irwin, PA to Oakland, MD.  The Garmin used state routes and backroads to get us there in 2 hours.  The TomTom insisted we take mostly interstate (and adding many, many miles) at an estimate of 2.5 hours.  The TomTom alternate route was even longer.  (Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, Mapquest all were similar to Garmin’s route.)  When we took the Garmin route, the TomTom said it would take over 2.5 hours (adding existing travel time + time left), but as we drove, the time remaining kept decreasing super fast.  The Garmin’s arrival time was rock steady all the way.

2. Address entry without City.  (Deal-breaker two)  There are many occasions in which I have a street address, but don’t know the city.  You know — maybe someone lives in a Township with a city’s mailing address, or any area known as “North Hills” has many post office names, but you don’t know which one.  Garmins give you a “Search all cities” option.  TomTom has no option.  You must enter a city.  If you don’t know it, you won’t get there.

3. SPEAKER. (Deal-breaker three)  I had read two problems with the speaker; 1) too quiet, 2) garbled.  I figured that if I got a bad one, I’d exchange it and I’d get a good one.  How widespread could the problem be?  Well — the first unit was very quiet.  If you have the radio on, you can’t hear this thing.  I called TomTom and the nice rep seemed to be very familiar with the problem and suggested returning it to the store.  So fine, I shipped it back to Amazon.  The second unit was much louder.  Wait — you couldn’t understand it, it was all garbled.  Well, third time should work.  NOPE — just like the first, you couldn’t hear it.  See the end of this post — I will post WAV files of what I heard.

4. POI annoyances.  On my first unit, when searching for a POI, it would show the distance you were from the POI, but not which direction it was from you.  This made it unusable.  I won’t make a big deal of this, because my unit #2 did have a directional arrow for each POI.  This may have to do with software version on the unit.  Secondly, though, it only listed a few pages of POIs.  I would have liked to see more choices.

5. Graphics.  The graphics rendering was very jagged and old-looking.  Garmin is far ahead here.

After doing all this testing, my decision was easy.  Even if the speaker actually worked, the first two cons make it unusable for me.

My final question is — TomTom, don’t manufacturers test products before they get shipped to poor American consumers??

Garmin c320 without music while driving

TomTom XL 330 #1 (the quiet one) without music while driving

TomTom XL 330 #2 (the garbled one) without music while driving

TomTom XL 330 #1 with music while driving

TomTom XL 330 #2 with music while driving

Comcast Cable Internet for $25/month!

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For those of you that refuse to pay $45/month for internet, here is another option. Comcast has an economy plan in some areas in which you pay $24.95 per month and get 768Kbps download speeds. They do not advertise this, but have it as an option to compete against Verizon’s 768K service. They also use it as a way to get dial-up users to finally give it up.

Lately in Pittsburgh, they have sent letters saying they are pulling the plug on analog phone customers, and that they must switch to Comcast Digital Voice. Then they offer TV and internet packages along with the phone service. They will include the Economy High Speed Internet in some of these package to keep the monthly cost low.

I am unsure if you must rent the modem or not…

Source: Wikipedia

Also, I read it in my January bill announcing rate increases.

Pictures of a Counterfeit Microsoft Office 2003 Professional

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Well, I got burned on eBay. I looked so carefully through listings that I believed were bogus and I settled on a seller (in the USA) with high feedback. I received the box today — a sealed Retail Box of Microsoft Office 2003 Professional. I was a little suspicious at first glance — something didn’t look right. What do you think (click to inspect closer):

I opened it up and here is the CD case:

Here is what really caught my eye, though, a book in the case…

Check out that S!

I pulled out the 1st CD and here it is along with a Genuine OEM CD (click on it to see it better):

Can you tell which is which?? Obviously my scanner makes it hard to see what the holograms actually look like. To the naked eye, they look very similar. The one difference that they can’t seem to replicate is the Microsoft box at the bottom — it should switch between “Microsoft” and “Genuine” when you look at the CD at various angles.

—

—

If you look closely, you’ll see that the holographic designs on a sticker on the CD on the right — look at the edge:

It’s just an amazing counterfeiting job.

For now, I opened a dispute with PayPal. The seller said he would refund my money when he got it back. He said he was sorry and that he was duped. I’ll keep this updated.

Here is an excellent summary of how to spot a fake Office 2003.

This is an amazing quote from a Microsoft press release in October 2006:

Overall, the study found, the chances of purchasing genuine, legally licensed Microsoft software on eBay is less than 50 percent.

It’s amazing to me that this can just keep happening. I guess globalization opens up lots of cans of worms.

Here another case of similar fraud.

Here is information about counterfeiting from Microsoft.

Here is detailed information about Office 2003 security features on the CD itself.

UPDATE 5/2/08: Yes, I am dumb. I bought an OEM Office 2003 Professional for around $280 and it’s counterfeit, too! I sent the boxed one back on Wednesday, and I’m hoping I can get the money back on that soon from the seller. I think PayPal may only cover me for $200 if they don’t refund my money. I’m hoping for this new seller that PayPal would cover me for the whole amount since it is a PowerSeller with PayPal Buyer Protection (with 99.7% positive feedback + 2200 rating) if the seller doesn’t refund me.

Here are some pictures:

Notice in the Certificate of Authenticity, on the right side vertically, that is supposed to be an interwoven ribbon, but in this case it is just scanned from an authentic COA and printed very professionally. Here is a close up of the real thing on the left and the bogus COA on the right.

You’ll notice on the real COA little bumps of paper covering the genuine strip and you can see through those bumps a little bit. On the right, the strip is just white and not seen.

Below is the CD itself, just like above, it is a sticker, and not quite as good as the one above, so it must be a different counterfeiter:

When I put the CD into my drive, here is what pops up (I typed in the key) — definitely not Microsoft!!

Followed by:

MY ADVICE:

Stay away from Microsoft and Adobe software purchases on eBay, no-name websites, Amazon Marketplace and everywhere that cannot be guaranteed. The counterfeiters appear to sell to a wholesaler that sells to someone else and no one knows it is fake. My store of choice is , they have a 100% legal guarantee and I’ve purchased thousands of dollars of software from them for years.

Do you need to buy a new digital TV before February 2009?

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NO!!

Boy, this is such an opportunity for deception (see this article, 3/4 of the way down), and I don’t like deception.  The myth is out there — you need a new HDTV before February 2009.  The cable companies and TV stores, I’m sure, aren’t going to try too hard to talk you out of that thinking.  For the cable companies, they’d love to sell you their more expensive digital packages that require a box at each TV, and we all know what the retailers want.  Here’s the deal:

  • If you have cable or satellite TV, nothing will change.  Comcast and the other cable companies will convert the digital signal from the broadcasters to analog and nothing will be different.  As Comcast in Pittsburgh has done in the past, cable companies will probably start taking away channels one-by-one for analog viewers to make you upgrade to digital cable boxes some day.
  • If you have rabbit ears on your TV, you need to take action:

Widescreen = Small Screen

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For some reason widescreen monitors are all the rage, so that’s primarily what the stores are selling now and almost all laptops now have widescreens. I suppose that the HDTV-look influences it and just because it looks cool and new, etc. However, I think that the sizes that are advertised are deceptive. For me, and many users I support, vertical size is very important. For businesses, a website or a piece of paper are not wide, like a movie, but rather tall.

Unless you have a really good reason, I recommend going with a regular ratio monitor (4:3 or 5:4). I have put together some measurements below that give some perspective:

  • Dell 1907FP 19 inch flat panel: 11.9 inches tall x 14.8 inches wide (5:4)
  • Dell 16 inch CRT: 9.5 inches tall x 12.75 inches wide (4:3)
  • 19 inch widescreen flat panel (calculated): 10.1 inches tall x 16.1 inches tall (16:10)

As you can see, a widescreen 19 inch monitor is actually 1.8 inches shorter than a regular 19 inch monitor. To match the height of a 19 inch regular ratio monitor in a widescreen, you’d need to buy larger than 22 inches. To go the other way, a 19 inch widescreen is as tall as a 17 inch regular flat panel monitor.

I found this GREAT website to figure it all out: tvcalculator.com and change the source image to none.

Routers – faster is better!?

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Please, consumers, do not take your purchasing advice from Best Buy sales people… It has been the myth that you must buy a new digital TV before January 2009 (I’ll blog about that another day). Now sales people are pushing Wireless-N routers. I was looking in a sales circular lately and it has FAST (Wireless-G), FASTER (Wireless-Super G), FASTEST (Wireless-N). This is just so deceptive.

  • Wireless-B has speeds up to 11 Mbps (don’t have newer security protocols)
  • Wireless-G has speeds up to 54 Mbps
  • Wireless-Super G (various names) has speeds up to 108 Mbps
  • Wireless-N has speeds up to 108 Mbps (but better range than B/G)

Just for perspective here are internet speeds available in Western PA:

  • Verizon $20/mo. and under DSL – 0.768 Mbps
  • Verizon $35/mo. – 1.5 to 3.0 Mbps
  • Verizon FiOS – 5.0 Mbps
  • Comcast – 6.0 Mbps

So, what you’ll notice is that any of the router should be able to handle the internet speed with no problem. The higher speeds on the routers will only affect transfers of files between one computer and another on your internal network. Most users don’t do that, do Wireless-G should be all you would need.