Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Mobile phone talk

As you might remember, a while ago I bought a Nokia E75.

In summary, its a rubbish device. It irritates me to no end, in spite of re-flashing it to not be a Vodacom-branded device. I updated firmware to 201.12.01, but this promised firmware update that solves all evils still doesn't fundamentally solve the major gripes; bad build quality, lethargic responsiveness and frequent "pauses".

Enough is enough.

So what I've decided to do is to go with the dreaded "two phone" model. I've gotten a Blackberry Bold 9000 to play with, and if I like it, I'll buy the updated 9700. This device will be used as the primary calling and e-mail device; something that Blackberry is apparently excellent at.

But its boring. And I (probably) won't learn anything. So I've also ordered a Motorola Milestone, otherwise known as the Droid in the US market. It looks hot!

I know, two phones is dorky. But lets see how it goes. Anything beats my E75.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Popcorn Hour C200

I used to use a Popcorn Hour A110 as a media playback device at home. It worked well, but when the upgraded C200 was announced, I had to have it; there was no rational reason or justification.

Well, I got it, and its even more awesome than the old one; its just a lot bigger. Think old-school video machine! Pity I'm watching it on my old rubbish TV; time to get an LED/LCD.

PS. While I was looking at this, I also investigated a Mede8er. It looks pretty cool, but I'm more confident in the development and codec roadmap of the Popcorn Hour team.

Dell Mini 10v as a Hackintosh

Very short post; got a Dell Mini 10v, which is exactly the same as the the Dell Mini 9 I blogged about earlier, except, (duh) 1" wider. This makes a big difference in both keyboard and screen comfort, so I would recommend this over the Mini 9 any time.

Same motherboard, webcam, bluetooth, 3G modem, wifi, except its a regular drive, not SSD. No biggie for me!

Don't buy a DroboPro or a DroboShare

I posted about the Drobo before. This month, I ordered its bigger brother, the Drobo Pro. Think the standard unit, but with iSCSI and 8 drives - awesome, the hotness!

Except, for two epic fails;

  1. It only allows one host to connect at a time using iSCSI
    • Which begs the question then WTF bother ?

  2. It behaves exactly the same as the Drobo with respect to logical volume size (i.e. 16GB)

These are stupid restrictions. Even more of an epic fail is the companion product, the DroboShare, which also has two epic problems;

  1. It doesn't support the Drobo Pro
    • So you can't network a Drobo Pro

  2. It only allows one username/password to be created, and that user has full write rights
    • Which makes it absolutely pointless as a NAS device

Come on, Drobo, fix these stupid restrictions.

Posting a US parcel to yourself

I've always battled with Amazon, amongst other vendors who refuse to ship directly to South Africa. I used to always beg, borrow and hijack colleague's luggage, and trade favours to ship parcels in and out.

I had to return a Tamron 28-75 f/2.8 lens, which stopped auto-focussing. A colleague took it through, but they would only ship back to a US address. Now I was stuck!

Enter shipito.com, a US-based remailing company. For a deposit of $8, and for $8 per package, I get a US address which they'll re-mail to me (giving me the choice of options).

I was sceptical of the service, but my parcel arrived two weeks after being posted, and I am now a happy customer. I was e-mailed constantly about when my parcel arrived and when it was sent off, and they even filled out the customs declaration for me. They offer re-packing and storage facilities, but for now, one package at a time seems to work. Its a great service.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Hackintosh confessions

I love my Macbook Pro. I have the 2.53 GHz first generation unibody, which is a great machine. At the time I got it, November 2008, it was the smallest Macbook with a Firewire port that I'd be happy to use as a daily machine; this is important to me.

But it was too big, and expensive, to haul around when travelling for a day or three (longer than that, and I would have to take it). I needed a smaller machine for travelling around, one to check my e-mail, Skype back to home and browse. I didn't want an iPhone or an iPod Touch (my opinion on these devices is no secret), but didn't want to spend much more than R5k. Enter left-field, a netbook. These all follow the same pattern; Intel Atom N270 processor, small-ish disk (either regular or SSD, 1GB RAM and a 0.3MP webcam.

Good enough; now I needed to find one that ran Mac OS X. The winner at the time was the Dell Mini 9. I managed to get one with 2GB of RAM, a 64GB SSD and a built-in 3G modem. Bonus! Thanks to a very active and committed crowed at Mydellmini.Com, I have been running a Hackintosh since early December 2008.

I've upgraded from 10.5.6 to 10.5.8 (with 10.5.7 in between), and last week made it to 10.6 (and then 10.6.1), without a hitch. Other than deep sleep not working (which is in progress), everything is flawless, and I have a mini-Mac that meets my needs perfectly.

Thanks, Mydellmini.Com and Dell; you've solved my computer-travelling problems!

Snow Leopard upgrade

When it was rumoured that build 10A432 of Snow Leopard was indeed the golden master, I got very excited. Even though there were copies of 10A432 floating around, I resisted temptation and didn't install.

The primary reason was the potential transition from 10A432 to whatever the final build was; there was no guarantee that I would be able to upgrade. I would more than likely have to revert to 10.5.8, and then upgrade to the retail edition. Reluctantly, I waited until it hit retail, and I proceeded to install it onto my Macbook Pro; lo and behold, it was indeed build 10A432. Oh well, nothing lost except some geek cred. I did this on the 3rd of September 2009.

The upgrade was flawless; mostly everything worked, and the few things that didn't were resolved by the 10th of September. There are a few visible changes, but nothing earthshattering. The big improvement for me is in responsiveness (I haven't seen the beach ball) in ages), and the general overall snapiness.

A worthy upgrade indeed!

Friday, July 31, 2009

Component switcher

I have several devices that use the one component input on my old-school CRT TV. Thanks to my Logitech Harmony One universal remote (which IMO is the world's best universal remote), my AV receiver, TV and associated device power on and configure themselves correctly. What is a PITA is that I then have to get up, and change the input using a manual AV switcher to the relevant component device. This sucks.

So, from those thieves, I've ordered a Impact Acoustics 3-play switcher, which I can then program using my remote to change inputs. Now that should be cool!

PS. I tried the Zakspeed S-video / analog-audio / composite switcher, but it seems to interfere with a component signal. Kudos to them for accepting it back though.

PPS. Changing my TV might be a better option that all these hacks, but I'm not quite ready yet to drop R30k on an LED TV; besides, right now there are not that many options. I'll wait.

Dual eSATA backplate

I've been looking for a dual-eSATA PCI back plate for a server, that I want to plug two drives into.

As luck would have it, not a single South African distributor has it in stock. I've had to bend over and take one by Wantitall, who will bring one in from overseas for me.

I'll give them this; they're easy to do business with, and they'll get me what I want, as quickly as possible. I just wish I wasn't funding their business model so effectively.

Apple Wi-Fi devices suck

I personally own three Apple Airport Extreme base stations, and have setup three at my office. I've also worked on the five of them my dad has scattered around his house. These are all at least the Gigabit, 5GHz-capable, 802.11n-draft compliant versions or later (including the newest iteration of dual-band devices).

They all suck.

  • Coverage is piss poor
  • features that work in one hardware class and firmware version fail in another hardware class (but same firmware version)
  • certain features have never worked (guest network access)
  • Apple almost never issue updates
  • and in general they're poor value for money.

The feature that is pissing me off the most at the moment is that if I switch on 5GHz-only networking on one of them (that is in a heavily congest 2.4GHz spectra region), the SSID disappears. The only way to get it back is to switch it to 2.4GHz.

Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Data Robotics's Drobo

So the Data Robotics' Drobo was something I'd always lusted after. A disk array that you can shove in any size disk, as long as you have at least two of them, and which allows you to expand/grow the volume when you need to and prompts you for capacity, failure or impending failure via lights, is cool!

It was always damn expensive, and had rubbish connectivity options (USB and Firewire 400)though. That's changed now; the distributor price of the device (ex-VAT) is under R5k, and it now sports Firewire 800. So, I got one, and shoved in 4 x 1.5TB Seagate drives. This gives you 6TB of raw storage, and about 4.2TB given the proprietary filesystem tech (BeyondRAID) they use.

Paritioning though was complicated by several logical layout options; I naturally chose the one to create a 16TB volume. None of the other options gave me the kind of life-span I would want out of a device like this. I want, in 3 years time, to take all 4 drives out, and stick in either 3 or 4TB drives. That'll give me 12 or 16TB, and by the time that isn't enough, I'll have other problems and solutions that will be sexier.

Given my 16TB configuration, this means that when I fill the 4.2TB of disk I have, the Drobo will prompt me to replace one or more of the existing 4 drives with bigger capacity drives (e.g. 2TB drives), and after some rebuild time, the volume will be redundant again. Great, no moving data around! Of course, a file-system integrity check on a logical volume that is 16TB big (but for now is only really 4.2TB big) does take some time.

Performance on Firewire 800 was sluggish, and frankly disappointing; 22Mb/s, which was under the ZFS-based array I have on my desk (consisting of 4 x 500GB Lacie d2 Quadra drives) which could hit 30Mb/s. The Drobo is however a lot easier to manage.

I've got it hooked up to an Apple Airport Extreme via USB, and its serving as an uber-NAS for home. Much easier, and in the long run, cheaper than a FreeNAS implementation.

Definitely a thumbs up!

Monday, June 15, 2009

Nokia E75

So I got a Nokia E75. Great phone, with some awesome features. Except for two things; the battery life sucks, and some of the best features of the phone seem to be poorly implemented or executed.

To elaborate, the high-level feature set that I was interested in was

Sounds great, but what doesn't work ?

  • the 1-business day battery
  • the fact that the built in E-mail client doesn't understand Destinations, Nokia's implementation of access-point bonding (i.e. try WLAN A if its present, otherwise WLAN B if its present, and then as last resort, 3G)
  • the fact that the built-in accelerometer doesn't seem to work with the tap-to-silence feature
  • the stupid Vodafone firmware on it (which amongst other things disables the built-in Nokia SIP client

So, how to get around these things ?

  1. Go read this thread, and download the Internet telephony client
  2. Go and download Birdstep SmartConnect, which implements bonding correctly
  3. Charge the damn thing daily
  4. Change the firmware to make it a generic Nokia phone (haven't figured this one out yet)

I hope a new firmware upgrade comes out soon, because this is currently not that great. But it beats the pants off an iPhone, which, BTW, can't even do any of these things that are badly implemented.

Handy tip: I bought an application which I see as very important to me; Best Profiles auto-switches the phone profile to a silent one when I have a calendar entry, and changes it back when its scheduled to finish. Now that is useful!

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Upgrading from 5400RPM to 7200RPM - worthwhile ?

My unibody Macbook Pro 15" shipped with a Hitachi 320GB 5400RPM drive. Nothing wrong with it, but not quite as zippy as I wanted.

So, I ordered a Seagate ST9500420AS, which is a 500GB 7200RPM drive. Nifty! Except, its been on back-order since February (yes, its now June). I finally got it into my grubby hands, used SuperDuper to migrate all the data, and then compared the xbench results. Data attached.

Summary; its worth the upgrade!

In terms of impractical, bogus numbers, startup time has dropped by 7 seconds, and application launching time by 28 seconds. Real-world usage shows a subtle (but important!) increase in I/O which means you see the beachball of death less frequently.

PS. Came across fseventer, a great file system utility. Worth downloading (credit to Macworld for the find).

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Networking around Time Machine's stupidity

Time Machine, the integrated backup system that ships with Mac OS X 10.5.x (aka Leopard), is notionally a great tool.

  1. it allows unattended backups to occur
  2. its free
  3. it does incremental backups
  4. it occurs in the background
  5. its got this kick-ass trippy restore interface
  6. its easy enough for the average Mac user to get it

So whats the problem ?

  1. it doesn't allow the backups it makes to be encrypted
  2. you can't limit how much space it'll consume (i.e. it'll consume everything, meaning you have to either have a dedicated partition or disk to make it work properly)
  3. if you have encrypted DMG on your file system, it'll mount it and store those unencrypted in your backup
  4. you can't tell it how frequently to run
  5. exclusion criteria are limited to file systems, not files or directories
  6. if you backup across the network, and you change the network interface (e.g. from WiFi to Ethernet), your backups will not transparently resume

To get around this, I decided to store Time Machine backups on a FreeBSD-based workgroup file server. I was going to use a CIFS-based Samba server, but thought that is a bit too open. Rather use Netatalk, an open-source AppleTalk and afp server implementation (it does tons more, but I'm only interested in the afp component).

It is obscurity, but access to the network is locked by a WPA2 key, user account and physical proximity (the WiFi doesn't propogate very far). That is a lot better than a drive on my desk, me thinks.

PS. You need to issue the magic command
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
to get Time Machine to see your new share as a valid destination. I also found creating the backups a pain; this blog post was very helpful.

Now to get a 802.11n WiFi access point; candidates are the Airport Extreme, a lousy, expensive and underperforming device which hardly ever works, or a Belkin Vision N1, which just looks cool (but has also gotten some rave reviews for performance).

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Quick photo workflow software

Apple Aperture 2, Adobe Lightroom 2 and Apple iPhoto 09 (aka Aperture Lite) are awesome photography workflow tools.

But, they're a bit cumbersome if you want to preview a collection of photos, delete the rubbish ones, rotate the keepers and organise them quickly. All of the above packages require you to import them, catalogue them (or have them added to the catalogue), build previews and thumbnails and after all of that, do your sorting. You then have to export the photos, remove them from the respective application and get on with your day.

This sucks.

So, I turned to Camerabits Photo Mechanic, which had some rave reviews. US$150 ? You must be joking. For that price, it should give personal commentary on my photos, and I know its not going to do that. So, I looked around for a Mac version of old faithful, ACDSee. Yay, they have one! But, its in beta. I downloaded it and tried it, and yes, it works. As a beta. But it'll be expensive - the Windows version now goes for over US$100. Too rich for me, and not available yet.

More digging revealed Lemkesoft GraphicConverter. It does everything I need, and about 700% more. And its cheap; US$35! Thank you very much, it works wonders! I can highly recommend it.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Hoodman Hoodeye and Amod results

I wanted to go to the Johannesburg Zoo to show my infant son some animals, and to try out some photography gear. To recap, I suspected the Hoodeye was going to be useless, and the Amod would work correctly. I was correct on the Amod, and the Hoodeye, to be honest, I could have lived without. It made discernibly no difference. So, save yourself US$30 and don't bother buying the Hoodeye, and put it toward the Amod.

At US$30, its a great little GPS, and works exactly as advertised. Pity I wasn't in the frame of mind to take amazing photos, but thats another story. Gallery pics are online. The entire family was out together, and that more than made up for the bad photos.

PS. 10 month old babies don't get that excited at the zoo, they just like being outdoors with their parents giving them tons of attention. Good enough for me.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Camera goodies - geotagging and eye hood

I have a Nikon D80 (which is a great camera in spite of all the negative reviews). It was, without doubt, the best birthday present I ever received, from my parents. My wife bought me a Thinktank Photo Airport Addicted, which comes up second. The photo's I take are on my gallery; I don't think they're very good.

Anyway, I noticed in the iPhoto 09 feature list the inclusion of geotagged photo support. Now this is cool. It means you can tell, on a map, where you took a photo. Very handy when you take lots of photo's that are similar, and/or outdoors. But all the "neat" on-camera solutions expect you to have a D90, D200 or higher. I'm not changing my body for the once-a-month photo expeditions I go on.

So, I stumbled across a fellow D80 user who ended up using the Holux M-241 GPS logger, and Ovolab Geophoto. The Holux showed GPS time (which was cool to set your camera), but looked like a bannana-coloured suppository and required some serious shenanigans to get data off onto a Mac.

I found reference to a driverless GPS, the Amod AGL3080, which is essentially a very simple GPS, that starts logging in 1, 5 or 10 second intervals as soon as it has a satellite lock. It works, very well. I've used it in some testing, and it works exactly as advertised. Logs the data, which is stored as a file on the device. The construction is cheap, the manual is crap and the unit doesn't look like it'll last if you're not gentle with it. But for my purposes, perfect!

I ended up using HoudahGeo to actually tag the photos. The two big reasons to use this over Geophoto were

  1. No CPU-crunching spinning globe on startup
  2. Ability to associate multiple GPS tracks to a photo group as opposed to only one

So far so good.

As an aside, I also bought a Hoodman Corp Hoodeye, which sounded great, except it looks like crap and feels worse. And their website made my eyes bleed.

I'll be using both on a shoot at the Johannesburg Zoo this weekend; I suspect I'll have a negative review of the Hoodeye afterwards. Lets hope I'm wrong.

Apple and the demise of Firewire 400

A colleague had her laptop stolen (a Macbook Pro), a machine that had Firewire 400 and 800. I too had mine stolen in November; thankfully mine was while I was sleeping, not at gunpoint.

Thankfully she saw the humour when I told her at least she could upgrade to a newer machine (there is a silver lining, even if its a bit scuffed). Faced with the replacement choice, it was either a Macbook (with no Firewire at all), or a Macbook Pro (which had Firewire 800 only). The Macbook was nicer for me (smaller, perfect specs and price point), but I ended up buying the Pro purely for Firewire 800. What's the big deal about Firewire ?

Firewire 800 (aka IEEE1394b) is cool; 800MBits (not like USB2's 480Mbits in burst mode). Firewire 400 (aka IEEE1394) is less cool (400Mbits), but far more ubiquitous. The basic properties are the same; I can plug a hard drive or peripheral in, and its powered by the bus far more reliably than USB-based power.

No drivers, fast transfer speeds, and the ability to chain and mix/match on the same bus. Oh yes, and the formats are backward compatible. Sounds great. Except that Apple has basically killed Firewire 400 (and replaced with 800) from most of their machines, and removed it completely from the new Macbooks.

Now this is annoying.

  • My camcorder no longer works on my machine without a different cable or an adapter
  • Firewire target disk mode is no longer available on all Mac's (this is a subtle return to the "what machine do you have, because it changes how I approach a problem" behaviour that is common with PC manufacturers)
  • My expensive Firewire 400 drive enclosures and hubs are useless
  • etc, etc, etc

Why Apple, why kill off a good option, and close options for Macbook users who are already paying a premium ? I don't get it.

As an aside, I just bought a Firewire 800 drive enclosure from OWC. Excellent drive, and the performance is brilliant! They're great for memory and drive upgrades too.

Rant: eSATA, what a stupid system. You have to supply your own interface and power. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Maybe USB3 will solve all of these problems and unify these disparate connectors.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Sheep shagger

Literally. Another proud South African, doing his bit for animal rights and equality.

See here. Summary, a 36-year old man was caught shagging a sheep, because it was keeping him awake.

Now, if a sheep was keeping me awake, I'd shoot it, or block my ears; and I'm a vegetarian. Not go outside in the cold and get funky, so to speak ?


Traditional broadcast media can't compete with BitTorrent

I don't have DsTV. I don't have a video store contract. What I do have however is an uncapped ADSL account, a server hosted in the US and some clever systems that, combined, mean that a TV episode is downloaded to my house within hours of it airing in the US.

And I'm not unique or alone in this. Friends of mine who are not in IT do the same thing (except they have DsTV for Formula 1). My mother understands the concept (she is a Brothers & Sisters addict), and in the medium term, this community will expand.

And thanks to BitTorrent, users are relatively anonymous and are forced to contribute back to the network, thus ensuring content is almost always available in a highly resilient manner.

Knowing that you can watch what you want, when you want it, without ads, in higher quality than currently comercially (and legally) available, is cool. Personal collections are limited only to your storage capacity; an average movie is 800MB, and TV episode is 350MB.

And if you take the confluence of three trends (ceteris paribus), namely

  1. Bandwidth will get cheaper
  2. Access speeds will get faster
  3. People will find ways to break copy-protection and DRM

I wonder what the future is of the traditional broadcaster and advertising sector ?

Tools like the Multichoice PVR and Slingbox, while technically excellent, still don't adjust the fundamentals;

  • you can only record (and conversely playback) something that has happened
  • its delayed by at least 3-6 months from its initial US airing
  • the quality of the video is poor and there is not enough HD content airing
  • I can't keep an extensive back catalogue

This logic applies equally to music and full-length feature movies. If I was Primedia or Multichoice, I'd be working frenetically on an online distribution model with a capable ISP rather than clinging onto a fundamentally dead business model.

For the geeks

While not endorsing downloading content and robbing starving artists, I would imagine that a good media download environment would look like

For the real geeks

Don't bother with the Apple TV. Its cumbersome, doesn't work properly in SA, difficult to use, hasn't got enough horsepower to playback proper HD content and requires you to crack it to get it to be halfway useful (e.g. playback of AVI files).

Femto vs WiFi as an FMC bearer

A good FMC service balances features, cost savings and implementability with implementation cost, intrusiveness into end-user behaviour and not pissing off the mobile networks.

Early investigation into a decent South African MNO-independent service implied no use of 3G / UMTS as a bearer. What would happen to your WiFi call when a GSM call came in and vice-versa, inconsistent quality and active hostility would make this a non-starter.

WiFi-based FMC solutions have been around for a while, are robust and solve the quality problem. But, they don't solve the cost, universality (how many phones have WiFi) and battery life problems.

While a WiFi-based solution will provide a rich experience for 10% of the potential user-base, femtocell-based solutions address 100% of the user-base.

Femto's use GSM RF frequency to the handset, and IP to the back-end switching and core network; handsets think they're talking to a normal cellular tower, new telco entrants can capture some market share and implementation is relatively easy and straightforward. But there's just one gotcha.

When you connect to the in-building femtocell network, you go off the public GSM network. So how do you deal with the in-bound GSM call ? As is, it'll go to voicemail. And that means being unreachable for at least 8 hours a day (assuming only WiFi at work), or in my case, 23 hours (WiFi at home and work, but not yet in my car). For any solution to work, you need a co-operative mobile network company. And in South Africa, that breed is impossible to find.

So for those of you wondering why there is no wide-spread South African FMC solution yet, please complain to your mobile network - they're impinging new telco's abilities to deliver cost-effective services to you. The cartel is hanging on as long as it can, before launching their own FMC service. And I can guarantee that agreement didn't need to be reached in London; it probably happened at the Michaelangelo.

Future-proof phones

How do you choose a future-proof smartphone ? There are a literally thousands of choices. You have to choose what you need. For me, critical criteria are;

  • The ability to send and receive MMS and participate in video calling (babies do cute shit at random times)

  • The ability to send and receive business cards

  • A battery life measured in days, not minutes or hours

  • The ability to run multiple applications at once

  • Activesync support


  • Bluetooth tethering

  • Use of the phone with one hand (and in a car)

  • No beach balls or equivalents to cover up rubbish code

I am not interested in camera support (I have several real cameras), multimedia (I have an iPod and enough storage to run a small country) or the ability to use my phone as a light-sabre and/or spirit level. I don't think these criteria are unique.

This rules out the jesus phone (iPhone) and all Windows-mobile phones (not even going to bother explaining) for me. The iPhone is a target for much of my wrath, because relatively intelligent people turn into blithering, sycophantic dimwits when someone presents them with functional technology that is at least 10 years behind the rest of the industry (remember, this is a device American's love, case in point).

But am I alone in this view ? Apparently, because even Nokia is launching of touch-screen phones, along with everyone else. Think Nokia 5800 & N97, Samsung Omnia, etc. All touch-screen, all featuring innovative design, all copying the iPhone. And the jesus phone itself is addressing most of these issues above. So would I consider an iPhone ?

As long as it had a keyboard or even the pretense of one (think Haptics technology), yes. I could live with all the above failings, because

  1. the intuitive nature of the interface is unparalleled
  2. the application variety and store framework mean supported applications that won't crash the phone
  3. the user base is strong, vocal and active
  4. the phone is putting smartphone features in the hands of consumers

The iPhone has pioneered a new revolutionary stage in the mobile phone space; it presents a rich, easy-to-develop against platform that means eventually people will buy their device for what it can run, not what it comes with or does out of the box. And that is truly future-proof.