Peter's Blog

My new battery has come and the battery meter is predicting seven hours of operation. That's fine for surfing, I very rarely get anywhere near that much spare time for a good surf. The old battery was down to 50 minutes from a full charge.

Running wow it remains to be seen how long it will last. It will be a lot less than seven hours but an hour or so will make me happy.

According to this very blog, I have had my Dell D410 laptop since 17th Oct 2005, just over a year (seems longer). I was playing World of Warcraft on it when suddenly it went into standby after only about 20 minutes from a fresh charge.

Looks like the battery is on it's way to battery heaven. After a full charge, when doing nothing the laptop is reporting 50 minutes estimated running time.

Looked up to see whether the battery was subject to the Dell exploding battery recall but it wasn't on the list so I don't get a free one

Found a new battery on ebay, looks like someone selling the 9 cell extended battery (80Wh vs 55Wh) for the same price as the going ebay rate for the standard battery. The extended one is a bit bigger, it will stick out the front a bit, but it will be able to run WoW longer.

Waiting for it to arrive. Must look again into options for extending lifespan of lithium ion batterys (no deep discharging etc). I haven't been that brutal with it, I leave it charging in the docking station every night.

No blogging for a while, been busy fiddling with my new Hauppauge WinTV Nova-t USB2 Digital TV Tuner. This plugs into a USB 2.0 port (won't work with USB 1.1) and allows you to watch/record Digital TV (Freeview in the UK).

Very long story so here are the highlights:

• Needs terrestrial aerial so took notebook (d410) into loft and connected it to existing unused aerial directly. Strong signal with no proper alignment, watched TV in the loft.
• When it is working picture is very good, digital quality. Recordings are just as good.
• Hooked aerial feed to computer room, signal too weak, black screen.
• Put booster amplifier in loft, signal strong enough again.
• WinTV2000 viewer app is crude and occasionally crashes. 64 channels (including radio) are chosen from a standard windows menu, too many options for screen so you have to scroll up and down. Argh. Channels are shown in random order.
• Comes with remote control. Set it to pause live TV and it worked. Couldn't figure out how to change channel or get out of live TV without rebooting the app.
• No real program planner in WinTV2000, just now and next when you change channel. Video recordings handled by entering time/channel in a seperate scheduler app. Primitive!
• Nero Home doesn't recognise WinTV box.
• Tried box in desktop PC and doesn't work. Only finds a few channels and it refuses to display them, even side-by-side with working laptop. It is hooked to USB 2.0 add-in card. Very annoying as desktop would be better for recording/media centre duties.
• After much research, downloaded Meedio a media centre app. Had trouble getting it working, only worked if I ran it after running WinTV2000.
• Meedio insists on showing 16:9 images on full 4:3 screen, fiddled with settings, no difference.
• Meedio TV playback stuttered a bit.
• Meedio is supposed to scoop program planner from the freeview signals but failed to do so.
• Has to be the most annoying application I have ever used. Designed to be used on TV so uses huge fonts meaning menus can only show five items at a time: there are invariably six items total and I want the sixth so have to scroll. Every time you click on something it plays a silly sound which is sooo grating. You can only disable sounds by fiddling in obscure plugin settings.
• Whenever I plug WinTV box into a different USB port, even on same pc, plug and play asks to install drivers. D410 has four USB ports (including docking station), desktop PC has four, so this is pretty tedious, especially as out of the docking station the D410 has no CD (e.g. when I was in the loft).

State of play:

• Doesn't work in desktop
• WinTV2000 is weak and crashes
• Meedio is annoying and has numerous problems to resolve.

Plans:

• Need to align aerial properly.
• Try ShowShifter
• Try gbpvr if I can bring myself to install .NET. Most of these things seem to use .NET so it may be unavoidable
• Try MythTV if I can stand the hastle of getting it to run on linux

Conclusion: sky+ is so good. If my experiences are anything to go by, the pc world still has some catching up to do.

Is it possible to spell Hauppauge correctly without having to cut and paste? How to pronounce it? What were they thinking? Tip for the day: make it your password. Even if someone guesses it, they won't be able to spell it.

Update: attempt to install gbpvr and get

Not only is the error message completely useless to anyone without access to the source code, you cannot even copy it into google to search for it.

Update 2: it turns out that this error means "You haven't installed the .NET runtime you moron".

gbpvr running fine and looks much better than anything else.

What with it being the Christmas holidays I found a spare couple of hours to set up the Docking Station for my Dell D410 Laptop. I set it up thusly:

• 17" CRT monitor
• Packard bell keyboard
• Packard bell wireless mouse
• USB 2 Hub
• External USB hard Drive
• Wired network so I can play with wake-on-lan and access it from the internet

I need to buy a long audio cable so I can plug it into the hifi.

It makes a nice system, the Dell is faster than the desktop. I still use the desktop system for the following:

• Canon USB Scanner
• Nightly backup of remote server

I could do my scanning on the laptop and I could set it up to do the nightly server backup as well. Since I set the desktop machine up for nightly backup I haven't got around to getting it to shut down automatically so one of my bedtime tchores is to turn it off. Once that is done I don't need the desktop...

I would like to set the laptop up for a nightly backup to the external hard disk: turn itself on at 3am, backup, then switch itself off. I'd like to figure out the most efficient way to do that: weekly full, and daily incremental maybe. This could be combined with the remote server backup.

The only disadvantage of a laptop over a desktop for me is that it has no PCI slots: the only PCI slot I could use is my TV card and I only need that to capture my wedding video (2 years, 3 months, still haven't got around to doing that). I'm not into games now (did I mention I'm married?) so I'm not inclined to upgrade the graphics: I'd buy an XBox 360 for that.

With my old Dell Inspiron 500m the wireless connection (using the Intel microcard that came with it) was not 100% reliable: I would get randomly disconnected and have to repair the connection maybe once a day. It was annoying and I blamed it on the Dlink Di624 router. It was never annoying enough to justify buying a new wireless router but I was tempted.

Since getting my Dell Inspiron D410 and using it for a couple of months I have realised that this problem does not seem to be happening. It is possible that it was the Dell 500m's wireless that was the problem. I am probably tempting fate and am going to be hit again or it may be that I repair connections automatically without thinking and don't remember doing it but I'm pretty sure I haven't done it for a while. The last time I did have a problem I remember seeing a neighbours unprotected SUID in the list of available networks so it could have been related to that.

Conclusion: apologies to dlink. I still wish I'd bought a linksys WRT54g though, one of the ones that runs linux.

Notes on Dell Latitude D410:

• Been surfing for about three hours and battery meter says battery is still 50% full (not empty). It says I have only 2:16 left so I had better type this quick. I think this is pretty good. I would do the test to see how long the battery lasted but then I wouldn't be able to use it (without mains) so I am going to recharge it now.
• Fiddling with trackpoint settings, discovered I can do a middle click by tapping the corner. This is nicer than middle-clicking by pressing two buttons together: the two buttons below the trackpoint click rather loudly. The two buttons above (for the nipple thing) are quite but not so convenient. I have been middle clicking in Firefox to open pages in new tabs so middle clicking is pretty important to me.
• Hibernates/dehibernates faster than 500m despite having to copy 1G of ram to disk.
• Default power settings put it in standby after 10 minutes or so unattended. Not sure why I disabled this on the 500m, it only takes a second to come back.

Conclusion: happy.

I fixed all the problems I had with my new Dell D410 Laptop. The trackpad is perfect, video fast, hibernates and restarts in about eight seconds. All I had to do was install Windows XP on it with all the Dell drivers.

It's only now I can see how fast it is: with ubuntu I felt it was somehow constrained, I was compromising and I would only see it's potential using XP. Ubuntu was doing weird things, the trackpad was unreliable and frustrating and sometimes when it was busy it wouldn't task switch, almost as if it had hung.

From the device manager I have confirmed that it has a 5400rpm hard disk which is good for a laptop and noticably faster than the 4200rpm disk in my old Inspiron 500m. 1G of memory makes a difference. Rebooting FireFox is instant, it just appears.

The screen resolution was immediately better, smaller text, more on screen. Then I was looking for the tweakui powertoy on the microsoft site and found the cleartype power toy which makes the text on LCD screens less pixellated: it really works, makes a big difference.

The battery meter tells me I have over four hours of battery life. I am unlikely to get four hours to test it in today but I will be happy if it manages that. The Dell can disable the wired network card when running from battery to save life. When I put the laptop in the docking station for a recharge then I can still use the wired network from that. Theory: does the extra power drain of 1G memory make up from the power loss of swapping to the hard disk?

I think I have reaffirmed my opinion that Linux is a fine server operating system and Windows is a fine desktop operating system. I have both available and I am happy.

Another theory: this laptop and all the peripherals in it were designed with windows in mind. The manufacturers of the various parts wrote windows drivers for them and did a good job because they knew the components intimately. Some linux drivers may be written by manufacturers, some from data sheets and some reverse engineered (educated guesswork). Which approach will give the best results? If some windows drivers are written badly and never peer reviewed will Dell use them in their PC's? My dedicated server runs debian, I am happy that it can control a hard disk and a network card. My desktop O/S has to be compatible with many more things.

Dell D410 whinges:

• It has just one speaker and it is pathetic, very tinny.
• It normally runs cool but if it is doing something CPU intensive it really chucks the heat out of a vent on the left hand side. The estimated battery life drops from three hours to one but comes back once things slow down.
• All Dell drivers are nicely organised in the 'Dell Resource CD' but you have to install them one by one (chipset, wifi, video etc) which is a bit tedious.

Got the trackpoint on my Dell Latitude D410 working under ubuntu warty warthog to some extent. Before it gave basic mouse functionality but I've got tap-to-click working (intermittently, as if there is a knack to it) and horizontal and vertical scrolling working (well).

This article was the main clue. Most important are the instructions for changing the event handler for ALPS trackpoint devices: this is what got the vertical scroll going:

Option "Device" "/dev/input/event2"
Option "Protocol" "event"

The event2 bit comes from the output of

cat /proc/bus/input/devices

which for me was:

I: Bus=0011 Vendor=0002 Product=0008 Version=6337
N: Name="AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint"
P: Phys=isa0060/serio1/input0
H: Handlers=mouse1 ts1 event2
B: EV=f
B: KEY=420 0 70000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
B: REL=3
B: ABS=1000003

Now to address the suspend-to-disk...

Got new laptop: Dell Latitude D410.

Specs:

• Pentium Centrino Mobile 1.86GHz
• 1G memory
• 40G hard disk
• 12" screen
• weights < 4lbs

I wanted something light, not a portable desktop but a true laptop.

I bought it from Europc as 'refurbished' which seems to mean factory return or < 6 months old. It was close to £400 off the Dell price. After I ordered it I started wondering what could be wrong with it as other similar systems from the same place were north of £850. The next day they rang me and asked me if I realised that it had no operating system. No Redmond tax: that explains it. I thought about it for about 2 seconds and said I don't care, I'll take it.

They weren't strictly accurate, it did come with a copy of Freedos...

I installed ubuntu on it, taking the plunge of going totally linux on my main personal computer. Can I live without Windows on it? If I can't I can always get a copy but let's see how it goes.

Various Notes:

• Looks like new, transparent film like new pc's have, not dusty or faded.
• Installed ubuntu with no problems, mostly it Just Worked.
• Had to downgrade wireless network to WEP as it does not support WSA out-of-the-box. I had to fiddle for some time to get the keys in agreement. Seems to work very well, maybe better than the 500m. I always thought that the di624 was the weak spot UPDATE: it is, see comment.
• Battery life is over three hours, more than twice the Dell Inspiron 500m and enough to last an evening. UPDATE: should mention (as I wondered this before I bought it but couldn't find mention in any reviews) that this was with Wifi running all the time. I set the screen to minimum brightness.
• Suspend to disk doesn't work. Had to install linux source code to figure out how it was supposed to be used and it didn't work anyway. I could go through kernel patching to get suspend2 running or I can live with a long initial boot and lots of suspending-to-ram (which seems to work fine).
• It has both a trackpad and a nipple thing: I hate the nipple things, I'm used to the trackpad from my 500m. Unfortunately the default drivers lack the support for scrolling, tap-to-click, tap and drag and various other neat shortcurs. I think I could get it working, either by patching the kernel or by installing a different version of X windows. I'm not in a big hurry to do either. UPDATE: trackpad working.
• Some reviews say the keyboard is cramped but to me typing on it now it is gorgeous: apart from the page-down key which is hyper-sensitive: I'm hoping the previous owner rejected it because of this and nothing else is wrong with it.
• Living with kubuntu: installed ubuntu and upgraded to it as the kubuntu servers were unresponsive. I got warty warthog which was released only days before I got the laptop.
• The 12" screen is a bit tighter than I had hoped. It is 1024x768 but seems like less. I've made the fonts small and I can get into the habit of running firefox full screen by banging F11. The display quality is good, crisp and good contrast.
• It's fast: nothing seems to take very long. Gimp boots in about five seconds, compared to maybe 15 on the 500m (under windows). UPDATE: not sure I've ever seen the top command show a process using more than 2% cpu time. Must find something intensive for it to do.
• It came with a media dock that holds the DVD-rom (no DVD-RW ). This can also act as a charging station and has sockets for VGA, wired network etc. It supports Wake-on-lan so I am tempted to set it up so I can wake it remotely from my hosting pc and do cool things like program the sky+ box from the irda port. I email the hosting pc from my mobile and coolness ensues.
• Better build quality than the inspiron. Lattitudes are the business models and are targeted higher. It doesn't creak much when squeezed. Not a 10/10, maybe 8 for creakiness, where 500m was a 5.

Right now I love it. The small screen may get annoying and I'll miss suspend-to-disk (unless I go kernel building, which I cannot be bothered with).