Peter's Blog

Decided to take the plunge and rip my entire CD collection. Recently moved house and decided I don't want ugly shelves in my new room, I'd prefer to rip all the CD's and put them in storage (definitely NOT sell them at a boot sale). Also, hifi can been streamlined to:

• pc
• old NAD3020 amp
• hifi speakers (mission surround sound things, cannot recall model)
• REL Q100 subwoofer (which I have switched off now as it makes whole house shake).

CD player, tuner etc also put in storage.

Ripping solutions came down to:

• iTunes: have a few iTunes tracks, would be nice to consolidate all music
• Winamp: advantage is that it's NOT iTunes
• K*****: some linux based thing or other

Decided on iTunes for these reasons:

• it will rip AAC files which is better than vanilla mp3 but is not an Apple proprietary standard, other devices will play it. Found an AAC player for The Core Music Player on pocketpc so decided mp3 was not a must.
• PC has two CD drives and iTunes can be set up to automatically rip a CD as it is loaded. With two drives, after ripped one has been ripped it will immediately start ripping the other, giving minimal down time. This was fine in theory but in practise one of the drives caused problems, halting the rip so I had to use just one drive.
• didn't want to mess around with linux: if I had hours of spare time then maybe I would track down the lame mp3 codec and piece it all together but I'm a busy man.

Ripping is progressing, 30 or 40 disks through and the iTunes CDDB lookup has not failed me so far, despite some pretty obscure CD's.

Next decision is: do I try squeezing music onto 1G compact flash card on pocketpc or buy an 8G ipod nano? 8G should be ample for me and no hard disk to skip tracks. If I go pocketpc then:

• one less gadget to carry around
• can use winamp to load music and playlists

New Dell X51v PDA has come. Have to say it again, but I got £80 off a brand new one through ebay: gotta love it.

Impressions of X51v wrt rx1950:

• bigger, fatter and heavier. Not as comfortable to hold in the hand. Slightly more plasticky. If I got a magnesium case for it then volume it takes in my pocket would be about same as rx1950 in it's original case. Walking around with wallet, pocketpc and mobile spread around pockets does tend to spoil the line of my outfits
• much nicer to use, very noticably faster. Apps that were sluggish or painful on rx1950 (pocket mindmap, especially Daynotez) are now quite usable. Internet Explorer is noticably better.
• no memory/random termination problems so far: with five or so apps loaded, still have two blobs out of five free (a blob is a unit of memory measured by vbar) where rx1950 might have one and a half with one or two apps running (and in this state one of the apps is likely to be terminated whenever the O/S feels like it: make sure those files are saved!).
• VGA (640x480) vs QVGA (320x240: I guess the Q stands for quarter) screen much nicer. Internet Explorer can show smaller fonts clearly, giving more on a screenful. The cleartype in Pocket Mindmap makes the characters look blurry, turning it off makes them look pixelated. Other apps are fine.
• Wireless seems to connect faster, less of a thumb twiddling exercise. Useful button on left to toggle wifi on and off.
• Still needs that reset button but then again it is still running Windows.
• Haven't tried the 3d accelerated games yet but rx1950 doesn't have 3d acceleration so that must be better. By an odd coincidence the DS Lite is out today.

Conclusion: rx1950 is better than nothing but more annoying than useful. Go on, buy an X51v, you know you want one.

Bought a Parker Profile 3-in-1 pen which includes:

• blue ballpoint
• 0.7mm pencil
• PDA stylus

As a pda stylus it is very nice: much more comfortable in the hand than the skinny little stylus that comes with the ipaq.

It works by magic: you turn the pen around until you see the label for what you want, then press the top button down and out it pops. At first I thought it was random as there is no obvious way to select what you want. I had to read the instructions There is some kind of gravity mechanism that senses the rotation of the pen, i.e. it won't work if you are standing on your head.

My normal method of ruining pens is to repeatedly dismantle and reassemble them, particularly in meetings. Must try not to do it with this: the bottom screw part undoes very easily and it will be mighty tempting.

I am not happy with my hp rx1950 pocketpc. Its lack of memory makes it flaky running multiple applications, some suddenly terminate without saving their data. They also randomly terminate when I turn it on from standby. This means that to be safe I have to exit the applications before powering down which makes continuing work tedious as I have to reopen the application in the right document. When memory is running short it can get very sluggish and it will often lock up and I have to press the reset button and wait a minute or so for it to reboot (it runs a version windows remember).

The upshot of all this is that I don't do any notetaking on it, which is the main reason I bought it.

It is fine for slingbox, surfing, rss etc, although slingbox player locks up if I try to use the remote control in landscape mode: could be slingbox but more likely the O/S and it's appetite for memory (needs 20M or so of RAM out of 32M: how much? What is it doing with it? How much of this could/should have been fixed in ROM?).

Options:

• Buy Dell axim X51 or HP hx2490
• Give rx1950 to wife/sell on ebay/use for satnav (it's too gutless for skype which would be the main use the wife could make of it)
• Live with it

Decisions.

Update: Bought a new Dell Axim x51v via ebay for £80 off Dell price, currently in the post. This is one of the fastest WM5 PDA's there is so it should have the horsepower for skype and it has twice as much ram so hopefully apps won't randomly terminate. Incidentally, I tried Minimo, a port of firefox to pocketpc, and it was hopeless, barely managed to show google.com. I think this was down to memory demands, given that firefox is pretty gluttonous in this regard.

x51v features compared to rx1950:

• cpu more than twice as fast
• 256M flash
• 64M RAM
• bluetooth
• 640x480 screen vs 320*240
• 3d graphics accelerator
• compact flash slot as well as SD which rx1950 has.
• an actual button to turn wifi on and off

I think the decider in making me buy this was the prospect that daynotez might be usable on it.

The novelty of the Slingbox hasn't worn off after five days:

• TV anywhere there is wifi
• TV on pocketpc (hp rx1950) around the house: watch in bed without waking wife/baby
• useable on wireless laptop where picture shows in a sidebar while I surf
• Remotely control PVR (albeit painfully sluggishly: there is a lag in the video stream so when you do something you have to wait to see the effect)
• Playback is pretty smooth, not crystal clear but watchable

It's the dog playing a piano thing, you just gasp that it does it at all, you don't really listen to the music.

The DVB tuner in the slingbox isn't as sensitive as the one in the humax PVR 9200T. The PVR receives all channels fine whereas the Slingbox struggles on the BBC channels where the signal is weaker, only 45% or so. I have the same problem with a cheapo Digimax freeview tuner that I bought in Tesco. Still, the Slingbox's tuner is only useful to me when the PVR locks up and it hasn't done that since I upgraded the firmware to 1.0.6 (fingers crossed).

I found a solution to the problem of the stylus of my HP ipaq rx1950 pocketpc falling out that is better than putting it in the case 'upside down'. If you take the battery cover off, there is a little piece of plastic in there with a dent in that is supposed to click into a groove in the stylus. If you carefully craft a small piece of paper to jam in between the battery cover and this piece of plastic you can place more pressure on the stylus and grip it more tightly.

HP Invent (bodges).

I haven't blogged for weeks but I've now done something so cool I cannot keep quiet about it. I've solved my mobile TV-watching problems. I have been trying for ages to build a reliable PVR system using the Hauppauge Nova-T USB and had given up because of the flaky software that is around.

My solution: Humax PVR-9200T Dual Tuner 160G PVR plus a SlingBox.

Humax PVR-9200T bullet list:

• easy to set up
• sensitive tv tuner, finds all channels where Nova-T struggled to find any.
• channel changing speed none too bad
• can do picture in picture
• can schedule recordings from the EPG
• can download recordings to PC using USB port
• can upload MP3s to play on it a-la juke box.
• can upload jpegs to look at on it
• can upgrade the firmware using an RS232 port, not via USB. Have to borrow cable from work.

Summary: good player

UPDATE: player locks up regularly when left on Channel 4. This seems to be a common gripe, something to do with the digital teletext for Big Brother. Will try updating firmware and using a better aerial booster.

UPDATE2: upgraded firmware over-the-air. Box ran overnight for the first time.

The Slingbox takes the output of the PVR and broadcasts it over a network. I can watch TV on laptops or my pocketpc both at home and anywhere I can get an internet connection. The Slingbox has two notable limitations:

1. the Sling Player software won't record the video stream
2. only one client can watch the output at one time

These seem to be anti-piracy measures: I cannot put up a feed where anyone on the internet can watch channel 4.

SlingBox Bullet List:

• easy to set up
• PC Software only downloadable: no CD in the box?
• software is nice, slick and well designed.
• SlingBox has IR transmitters to control your PVR (or DVD Player, TV tuner or whatever your source is). This makes control sluggish and it doesn't support everything the PVR can do (e.g. turn on picture-in-picture).
• have to pay extra $30 for pocket pc version of the software: what a rip.
• the uk version includes a DVB-T tuner (i.e. freeview) but it's not as sensitive as the Humax (which found all the local channels) and the control of it is pretty basic: no EPG!!

Summary: it is good but over-priced

Hooking two consumer devices together has solved my problems: within two hours it was all working. It is not the cheapest solution but it is cheaper than a dedicated media PC would be. By cancelling my sky+ subscription the PVR will pay for itself.

Pocketpc news:

• I bought myself a copy of pocketpc mindmap. This is a neat little mindmapping/outlining application. I like mindmapping for brainstorming things and this tool does it well. It's got many features in a small size. Some features:
  • Can flip between a mindmap and a regular tree-like outline. This makes it useful for either or both purposes
  • Useful 'add multiple' mode gives me a text box where I can enter multiple entries in one go, one entry per line. Any indented lines become sub-entries. Much quicker than creating nodes one by one.
  • Can quickly assign icons to nodes
  • Can assign 'scribbles' to nodes: good for displaying my lack of artistic skill
  • Can export maps to pictures:
    
• Bought tengo. Trial period ran out and I was lost without it.
• Battery life seems to have got better: two or three days use between charges. Or am I using it less? Anyway, I don't feel tied to a battery charger.
• Still fed up with applications randomly terminating when I power it up. Windows Mobile is not the most robust OS I've ever used, wouldn't want it on my phone. I read that microsoft have spent $1 billion developing the Windows CE/Mobile line of OS's. Where does that kind of money go?

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.

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.