Peter's Blog

I haven't blogged for over a month for personal reasons that I won't go into. I have quite a few things to write about, I have still been doing techy things over the last five weeks but I haven't felt inclined to discuss them with anyone. I have just set up a new blogging tool which may just inspire me to get posting regularly again.

Watch this space.

Bought myself a new PDA, an HP Ipaq rx1950 Pocketpc. It was a bit of an impulse buy, a bit of retail therapy I felt in need of a few weeks back. The model I bought was essentially the cheapest I could get locally that had integrated wifi.

I used to use a palm tungsten T2 but it's digitiser does not work properly, it takes about five goes to get past the initial calibration and it's downhill from there. I still had a hankering for a pda, a portable notetaking device to serve as a backup for my failing memory.

Following my experiences with the palm and bluetooth I decided that wifi was pretty much essential, bluetooth was slow and the bluetooth stacks in windows complex and buggy.

The rx1950 runs Windows Mobile 2005, the latest name for Windows CE/pocketpc. It is a stylus driven thing, not my first preference but keyboard models are more expensive and have smaller screens.

Bullet point review:

• first impression when I took it out the box was how light it is, much lighter than my old palm. It's fairly thin as well, maybe half an inch thick. It would fit better in a trouser pocket if not for the carry case that comes with it which is almost as thick again.
• nice solid build quality: HP after all.
• stylus has a tendency to fall out: I put it in the carrying case the wrong way round to restrain it or I would certainly lose it.
• no charging cradle: comes with a USB cable and a mains adapter that plugs into the USB cable: rather awkward and fiddly and annoying that it cannot charge from the USB port. There are aftermarket USB cables available that will charge it.
• synchronises with the pc using activesync and I was amazed to discover that it won't sync over the wifi. Apparently microsoft decided it was a security hole and they couldn't think of a way to plug it so they just removed the feature. This leaves USB or infra-red so I'm using USB when I feel the need. Many pocketpc apps are available as cab files that can be downloaded directly to the device over the wifi and installed. Some producers are not enlightened to this and ship apps with windows installers that use activesync and hence can only be installed at home base.
• the device has 32M of 'program memory' for running programs data and this isn't really enough. The symptoms of this seem to be the o/s terminating apps that are not in the foreground. If you have, say, windows media player playing something then you can only run maybe one more program before something gets randomly zapped. Microsoft have tried to create a paradigm where you don't have separate applications but flip between different modes without worrying about having to close apps down. Apps are closed automatically by the OS as memory runs low and should be designed to save their state such that when they are reopened they are in the same state as when they were shut down. Unfortunately it looks like developers use standard development techniques and applications being suddenly terminated by the OS leaves the user high and dry.
• it has another 32M for storing programs but I bought a 1G SD card and I put everything in that.
• the screen is just about big enough. It is ok for reading without scrolling too much. For most web browsing it is awful unless I use http://skweezercom or google mobile to strip out any fancy stuff.
• the character recognisers that come with it are not much good: the handwriting recognition (transcriber) is slow and inaccurate. I am using something called Tengo which is a bit like predictive text on a phone so involves hitting only six big buttons. It has some clever design features and there is something about it that is kinda fun. I am writing this review with it so you may spot predictive-text style wrong word errors.
• a frequently used feature is the reset button: windows mobile is a typical windows o/s and isn't sophisticated enough to offer robust task management. Applications can lock it hard and banging on an unresponsive plastic screen is particularly fruitless.
• it has speaker and microphone. The speaker is just about loud enough to listen to podcasts. I haven't tried skype on it, the skype site doesn't list the rx1950 as supported and the cpu may not be fast enough.
• has 3.5mm audio jack and the sound to my ears was pretty good. It is a good mp3 player.
• battery life is very good, one charge gives a good day of use.

As a device for browsing rss feeds while watching tv, taking notes, listening to music, watching videos or whatever it is just fine. It is more convenient than a laptop and I can carry it in my pocket so is far more mobile. I can see that it is a quirky platform and will probably have been killed off by mobile phones and mp3 players within two years time.

I'll write about the applications I have installed in it some other time.

There are three ways to blog from a pocketpc that I have found:

1. open your blog in a web browser and edit it as normal. This doesn't work so well in practise unless your web page has been designed with a css style sheet that works nicely on a pda. I tried modifying my drupal theme accordingly and made it presentable but it's not up to data entry.
2. try using an application for posting to blogs. There are a couple of these about but those that I tried were buggy or had tiny little edit boxes.
3. write the article and submit by email. This is how I am posting this, I use phatnotes, a notetaking application that can send the notes via email. I don't use pocket outlook for the simple reason that it doesn't seem to save sent mail so I cannot edit the article and send it again to modify it. I use my old mailbot script on the server to capture posts and poke them into drupal.

So far this has worked ok and I can compose posts offline and upload them at my leisure.

Disadvantages:

• No preview unless I go online, hence I keep posts simple.
• cutting and pasting urls is fiddly and I cannot be bothered with it.
• my script adds tags by scanning the database for existing tags, searching the post for the tag words and adding the tags that it finds. This can give irrelevant tags and I cannot define new tags. I need a neat way to specify tags in the post.

Advantages:

• the convenience of whipping my pda out and having a quick blog. I don't have to go upstairs and get my laptop.
• can lay on settee and blog in comfort.

I have tried a few rss reading options for my ipaq. All these allow articles to be downloaded to the pda for reading offline when out of wifi range or with the wifi turned off to save the battery.

• avantgo: an online service that generates feeds suitable for display offline on a pda. It's free if you use less than 2M if data a day. You can chose from specially formatted content such as the guardian newspaper or any rss feed
• feederreader: an rss aggregater that supports enclosures i.e. it can download podcasts. I found this over complicated and fiddly. It is free although donations are encouraged.
• egress: a commercial rss reader but I have found it much better than the others and it isn't that expensive. It also supports enclosures.

I wanted an rss reader that supported enclosures so I could download podcasts directly to the pda where I can listen to them anywhere, no messing with synchronisation. I have even plugged the pda into my hifi with good results.

I first used feederreader for this but I finally abandoned it because it gave the files it downloaded meaningless names containing just numbers. Egress gives them the name the author gave them which better describe the contents. Ok I could launch the playback from within feederreader but I don't want to, I don't want to have too many apps open at once or the pda gets flaky

I then found Egress to be a pretty good way to read rss in itself: the buttons in the pda step through the articles nicely. I haven't bothered with avantgo since I started using egress. I'm still in the trial period but i'm sure I will buy it.

I'm back to using Outlook for two reasons:

• the journal feature may be useable as a desktop notetaking tool. Being integrated into the email program means fewer apps running and a leaner and meaner system (ha). It does look like a half decent note taking tool, entries can be formatted, pictures pasted in etc.
• was reading how hackers can carry packet sniffers on memory keys and became paranoid about my unencrypted password floating around the ether(net). I looked into setting up ssl authentication on the exchange server but it involves messing around setting up an ssl certificate server and I couldn't be bothered.

I've given up on using folders to categorise my email: I leave it all in the inbox and rely in searching to find stuff. I have google desktop search to speed this up but that still thinks I am still using thunderbird and tries using that to display messages. How to persuade it I have vaccilated back to the evil ones?

Gave qumana a try. It is a blog editing application that posts entries using whatever xmlrpc interface may be available. Here is the bullet list:

• very wysiwyg, with all the advantages and disadvantages that follow: easy to do simple/pretty stuff but interferes horribly with wilki formatting.
• easy to add adverts to your posts, should you be that concerned with making money.
• supports posting with tags and adds it's own tag by default, which upsets some purists who haven't figured out how to disable it.
• supports image uploading which had a silly bug when I tried it: if you don't select an image file it still tries to upload it and locks up.
• it doesn't honour the ancient ctrl-ins, shift-ins copy and paste keys I prefer. This may be a consequence of being written in java which also makes it boot sluggishly.
• comes with a 'drop pad' onto which you can drag and drop stuff for posting: very nice, except you cannot drag the drop pad onto a second monitor (so time for a 30inch wide screen).

For me it interfered with my wilki formatting too much to be useful on this blog. If I was happy to let it take care of the formatting then it would be just fine.

This and this aren't about me. There are a surprising number of illustrious figures with that name though.

I've been trying out various alternative methods of text entry on my pocketpc. Each different entry method is implemented by a SIP (Soft Input Panel) and Windows Mobile 5 comes with four SIPs built in:

Block Recognizer

a bit like palm's graffiti. Requires remembering odd letter strokes and neat writing.

Keyboard

tiny keyboard to peck text out on. Will suggest a list of words, given enough letters to work with so you can choose a word from the list.

Letter Recognizer

recognises less formally written letters than Block Recognizer. This one reminded me most of my palm tungsten T2.

Transcriber

supposedly handwriting recognition but not accurate enough to be useful.

The third party things I have tried are:

Tengo

this one works like predictive text on a phone but with just six buttons. It's kind of fun, the keys are large and you can type quite fast but it is very error prone, frequently choosing the wrong word and going back to correct errors is quite fiddly. I am getting tired of it's mistakes. Like a phone you can re-select a word and chose a different completion but it has an annoying bug where it adds an extra space after the word which my perfectionism cannot ignore.

Calligrapher

supposedly better handwriting recognition but not good enough to be useful. This is mainly my fault for having poor handwriting (these days I only use it to write my signature).

Fitaly

a weird, supposedly efficient keyboard layout to learn, tied with a list of word suggestions. This was ok but the word suggestions weren't much better than those provided by the pocketpc keyboard, still have to type four or five letters to get any suggestions.

WordLogic

another mini qwerty keyboard but with a more sophisticated word suggestion mechanism, often it is only necessary to type the first three letters of a word. When I try to add a new word to WordLogic it seems to crash it and I have to reopen the SIP.

Tengo is most fun but the error rate is bad. WordLogic is my next preference, I make fewer errors but it feels like a slow way of writing. I think this is because the keyboard is too small, most errors seem to be due to tapping the wrong letter.

Conclusion: no clear winner. Letter Recogniser is the best of the built in ones, it is probably faster than WordLogic. I do have a soft spot for tengo though.

I'm laying on bed writing this on my pocketpc while listening to the Daily Source Code. I'm using gsplayer to play it while writing, surfing or whatever. It's a simple program, it just plays mp3s but it does it very well, the sound quality is very good.

When I have tried using Windows Media Player, which was bundled with the ipaq, I run into odd problems with running out of memory if I try doing anything else. gsplayer doesn't seem to have these problems because it isn't bloated.

The one thing it is missing is a slider bar to choose a place to resume playback: it only has fast forward and rewind. This makes less than totally convenient to use on a device such as this where playback is likely to be interrupted at any moment. UPDATE: discovered that it does have a slider bar only it's a very plain line that I only noticed when I clicked in it by mistake.

I'm using some cheap philips in-ear headphones (7 pounds). My main purchase criteria for them were:

• not too cheap (90p in tesco: cannot be any good)
• not too expensive (my hearing is not great anyway)
• comes with carry case so I don't have cables tangling all the time
• black/dark grey so i won't get mugged for my 'Ipod'.

They sound good to my ear, I'm happy with them.

The ipaq has a built-in speaker which is just about loud enough to listen to stuff if you are no more than three feet away and there is no background noise.

I still want to set up a system what will automatically record tv programs for playback on my pocketpc. For various reasons this is becoming more important: in a nutshell, I can only take so much ITV.

Been trying to setup mythtv on a new pc I have acquired. I have tried various windows PVR packages in the past but none of them were attractive, being flaky and annoying (including meedio which of now available for free as yahoo go). Mythtv was attractive because of it's flexibility.

I installed a clean kubuntu install in the box which went quite smoothly and after some exploration I established that the kernel already supported my hauppauge nova-t usb. I found an application called kaffeine that was already installed which was able to display tv and this essentially Just Worked out-of-the-box, albeit with lip-sync issues (probably because it needs the proprietary nvidia drivers).

Still desiring mythtv, I found an ubuntu repository that has mythtv packages for version 0.18 and installed that. I looked in the ubuntu package readme which says something to the effect that whoever set it up had no experience with mythtv and didn't know what he was doing. Thanks for the warning. I set it up using the mythtv-setup application, started the mythtv backend and tried to start mythweb. I am mainly interested in this as a way of remotely scheduling recordings, I care not about using the myth frontend. Mythweb wouldn't work, it complained about being a different version to the back end. The php code appears to display this error if there are any problems communicating with the back end but I decided I wouldn't mess around getting an old version to work, I would build the latest 0.19. After a few hours of installing dependant packages it built but when I tried running it I got a segmentation error. At this point I gave up with mythtv, I just don't have the time to nurse it into life. mythtv seems bloated and fragile. there is the option of knoppmyth, a dedicated mythtv distribution, but I'm not sure how cutting edge this is, whether it is any good as a general purpose linux distribution or whether the kernel will support my tv card without having to fiddle with compiling it.

I had a brief look at freevo but sourceforge was down (what an advert for oss) but found that freevo used command line tools to do the recording so I am currently investigating that approach: knocking up simple python scripts to do just what I want. I would rather debug these than mythtv (hell is other peoples source code).

Incidentally, I was browsing through some ruby source yesterday and for a few files there I was wondering whether ruby had a comment character.