Friday, February 12, 2010
My wife finally bought a new laptop, a Dell Studio 15. It was very painful helping her decide which machine to buy as she basically wanted everything: speed, long battery life, great tactile keyboard, connectivity, minimal weight, good screen resolution, low price and style! These are all things that get compromised. I suggested she get a desktop plus a netbook but she also doesn't like wires and ugly bulky pc cases. I dissuaded her from all-in-ones as being expensive and not upgradeable. So it was going to be a laptop.
I did suggest she could buy a Apple MacBook Pro as long as she didn't ask me to support it :-) And I proved to her how much a premium you pay for a Mac compared to an equivalent Windows PC. But they do look nice.
In the end, we agreed she didn't really need great portability. Her iPhone provides mobile Internet access and is good as a read-only device. Instead, she just needed a small powerful laptop and a high quality external monitor at home.
So with that in mind, we decided the Dell Studio 15 was a very good bargain: a Core i7-720QM CPU, 4GB of fast DDR3 RAM, 802.11n WiFi, integrated webcam, ATI Mobility HD 4570 graphics card and Windows 7 Professional all for about £800. At the time we shopped around, other laptops with that CPU were much more expensive. And you can customize the finish too; hers is purple.
The main alternative we considered was the HP Envy 15, a much more stylish machine with a few better specs but costs another £380. For that extra money, you can get a netbook!
This isn't mean to be a review but here's the downsides of the Studio 15. The screen resolution is low at 1366x768 but that doesn't matter if you plug it into an external monitor. It also doesn't have enough USB ports but we can hook it up to a USB hub integrated with a monitor. It's also bulky, a little bit noisy and can only last 2-3 hours on batteries but it's not meant to be a properly portable laptop. It's a desktop replacement that's easy to move.
Finally, since it doesn't costs so much, it's reasonable to upgrade to a new laptop sooner and pass this on to our kids than try to hang on to it as long as possible. Her old laptop was an Acer TraveMate 800 with a 1.3MHz Pentium M. Certainly got all the value from that!
Friday, January 29, 2010
I finally ran out of hard disk space on my server and had to buy some new hard disks.
I generally stick to Samsung, Western Digital, Hitachi or Seagate as reliable brands with my preference for the first two. At the time of writing, 1.5TB hard disks offer the best space/cost tradeoff and that is usually my first criteria for selecting a drive if other factors are all equal. For big drives, I've started buying eco drives that run at 5400rpm and consume less energy. They're fast enough for serving media. So I quickly narrowed down the choice to either the Samsung or Western Digital 1.5TB offerings.
I then discovered Western Digital's Advanced Format which is described well on Anandtech. Interesting stuff so I paid a little premium and got two WD Caviar Green 1.5TB drives with 64Mb cache (WD15EARS). My hope was that they would format with a little higher capacity but in fact, they don't! Capacity is 1430797Mb which is exactly the same as my Samsung 1.5TB drive. So at this point, the user gets no benefit from the 4K sectors and the OS still accesses the disk using a 512K sector emulated interface.
Furthermore, the current Western Digital Diagnostic Utility (DLGDIAG 1.17) doesn't support these new drives (cable test, write sector error?).
The hard disks work fine but I'm annoyed there's no discernible benefit to this advanced format and they lack diagnostic support. Save a bit of money and buy the Samsung 1.5TB hard disk instead.
I recently discovered an iPhone application called MonkeyTunes by Melloware. It's excellent.
It's a plugin for MediaMonkey that implements the Digital Audio Control Protocol (DACP). This allows MediaMonkey to masquerade as iTunes! In turn this allows the Apple Remote application to control MediaMonkey.
It works really well. I can now sit on my sofa rating the tracks in my music collection with my iPod Touch and my wife can control the stereo with her iPhone. Very cool.
This got me wondering whether I could control Windows Media Center with the iPod Touch which led me to discover HippoRemote! It has two components: a VNC server and a VNC iPhone application. VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing and is a proven open standard for remote computer control. Once installed, you can use the iPod Touch as a multi-touch trackpad which allows you to use it for gestures with Windows 7. The application has profiles for specific applications and the one for Media Center worked really well. You can also use it to launch apps and I soon worked out how to launch MediaMonkey. Very impressed with it.
The only down-side is that using a touch screen as a remote means you lose any haptic feedback compared to the solid buttons of a real remote control. It's easier to make mistakes if the remote tries to put too many functions on the screen.
I imagine this might all work really well on the Apple iPad that was just announced this week.
Friday, January 22, 2010
I struggle when I look to buy a new monitor because I find there are so many things to consider. After quite a bit of research, I bought a Dell Ultrasharp 2209WA for the kids home computer to replace an old 4:3 17" monitor.
One review called it a near perfect 22" monitor. There's a thorough review of it over on Prad.de
It uses an e-IPS panel which provides a wide viewing angle with minimal colour shifts; good when more than one person crowds around the computer. The colour gamut only covers sRGB; not a wide-gamut but that's good enough for a family computer as it's the most common colour model in use on the 'net. Being part of the Ultrasharp range, it's covered by Dell's generous bright pixel policy which is a real bonus.
On the downside, it's only 1680x1050 where I would have prefered 1920x1200. However, an IPS monitor of that size is almost double the price so the trade-off is between an e-IPS panel at this size or a larger TN film monitor at a similiar price. I'm happy that 1680x1050 is good enough for what the kids do. When playing games, it also means the graphics card doesn't struggle as much as it would for a higher resolution. The monitor has a 6ms response time which is fine for gaming.
The design and ergonomics of the monitor is superb. No complaints at all. It looks good and the stand adjusts well. In fact, it's particularly good in portrait mode. A 24" is just a bit too big in portrait but the 22" works quite well. One day, I can see put to use as an excellent second monitor.
Two more drawbacks. It doesn't have an HDMI port but that's not too bad since you can just use an HDMI to DVI-D adapter. The second drawback is more serious; it doesn't have a flexible 1:1 pixel mapping ability. All it can do is is allow a 4:3 non-stretch mode.
So the important point is that it's a great 22" computer monitor but it's not a flexible multimedia monitor. It won't be any good for hooking up a console or a media player. However, if you're just going to hook it up to a computer, I would recommend it.
I also got the Dell Soundbar for it and while it's convenient, the sound is pretty rubbish. I would recommend sticking to seperate speakers. In fact, I doubt you could ever find a monitor that has decent sound from integrated speakers.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
I recently bought a copy of Windows 7 and installed it on my Media Center PC. I'm still runing Windows Vista SP1 on my main machine and Windows XP for my game partition. I've been asked by friends whether they should upgrade which made me ponder this post.
Is Windows 7 worth it?
Your choices are Home Premium (upgrade £65, full £100) or Professional (upgrade £140, full £157) or Ultimate (upgrade £150, full £165). Prices are from Amazon UK. A quick check of the edition comparison table makes it clear very few need Ultimate and you only need Professional if you want to join a domain. For the majority, Home Premium will suffice. A full version is handy if you ever need to do a hard disk wipe and reinstall the O/S but you can save £35 just buying the upgrade. So we're talking about £65.
I'm not going to go through a feature by feature comparison of Windows versions but here's my impression so far.
Windows 7 is nice - no doubt. There's no need to wait for service pack 1. It's solid and ready to go.
However, I'm perfectly happy with Windows Vista with service pack 1. I know it earned a poor reputation on release but with the service pack and all the updates, it's solid and easy to use.
I've read that Windows 7 is supposed to feel more responsive but I haven't noticed it. It's not a vast improvement on Vista in terms of performance. A bit better here and there. Better file copying for example. It won't make you go wow though. I know there's some huge improvement under the hood especially with multiple processors but it doesn't mean much to the average user. Really, it's a refined version of Vista.
So here's my advice.
If you're running Windows XP, then it's time you upgraded to Windows 7. If your computer is old and slow, you're probably best off buying a new computer with a full version of Windows 7 bundled with it. If you're happy with your computers current performance, then just buy the upgrade to Windows 7 and be prepared to install all your applications again from original disks.
Before you upgrade, make sure there are drivers for any old peripherals you want to keep - especially printers and scanners. Also be prepared for spending some time figuring out where they moved everything in Windows 7. There's a lot of changes compared to Windows XP.
If you're running Windows Vista and your computer is performing well, the choice is much harder. Unless you see something in Windows 7 that you think is a must-have feature, then just stick to Vista until a compelling reason comes along. No hurry. Wait for a great discount on the version of Windows 7 you want or wait until you buy a new computer. The upgrade from Vista is very easy when you need to do it.
But you know what, I'll still run Windows XP on my game machine as I really just need the OS to launch applications and it works perfectly well for that.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
No, not really.
My conclusion is that if you have a TV that has a diagonal smaller than 46 inches and you watch from about 10 feet away, it really doesn't make a difference to your viewing experience compared to a upscaling DVD player.
This is just based on my experience watching Blu-ray on a 1080p 42 inch upscaling Samsung TV. Yes, you can tell there's some more detail there but my point is you soon forget about it and it doesn't change how you enjoy the film. Without upscaling, I suspect there might be a bigger difference between DVD and Blu-ray on 40+ inch TVs.
I'm guessing that at 46 inches, Blu-ray starts having a bigger impact and I'm fairly sure once you get bigger than 50 inches, then Blu-ray comes into it's own. Where Blu-ray must really shine is with projectors and big screens.
I've also found that with rented Blu-ray disks, they're quite susceptible to damage which shows up as horrendous bands of colour artifacts. They're not as robust as I had hoped.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Up until now I haven't been rating my music tracks but I recently decided I have to do it in order to sync only tracks I really like on my iPod Touch.
I currently play music by selecting genre or album but you wind up listening to songs you don't really like. I definitely don't want to manually maintain playlists. A better approach is automatic playlists which selects tracks on criteria you set. The best criteria for this is genre, year, mood and rating.
So far I've avoided ratings because ratings shouldn't be stored with the track itself. A rating is a users personal evaluation and as our music collection is shared across everyone in the family, not everyone would agree on a tracks rating. However, I don't want to store the ratings in a seperate database tied to a particular media player. As far as I can tell, there's no alternative like a sidecar XML file.
So I've given in to need and started rating music tracks and storing it as part of the metadata. Maybe in the future, there will be a better solution. I use MediaMonkey and it supports a commonly used five star rating system. Here's my scheme:
One Star *
There's something appealling but you have no committment to listening to it. It's ok if someone skips to the next track. It's music on the edge of your normal listening. You wouldn't say you like it but it tickles your ears in some way and in the right mood, you might want to hear it again. Give it one star so you remember to play it again one day.
Two Star **
You will listen to the track. It might not make your toe tap but it's pleasant enough. Background kind of music or it's something you think might grow on you with repeated listenings. Music in the jury dock that's worth another listen soon.
Three Star ***
You will publicly declare that you like this track and would be a little miffed if someone hit the next button. You enjoy it and it starts to involve you. Head nodding or toe tapping.
Four Stars ****
An excellent song and worth paying for it. You want the volume turned up. Makes you want to sing, dance or listen. You would be annoyed if the next button was hit. If you were at a party, you would want it played.
Five Stars *****
This is a classic track in it's genre and worthy of a place in a list of top tracks. The problem with a five star track is you don't want it played to death even though you really like it.
In the above scheme, the main listening is 3 stars to 4.5 stars. Add in 2 star tracks if you want a broader selection of music. Play 4 to 5 star tracks for a great classic selection of music. Visit 1 star tracks when you're in the mood for something new.
Note that there's a natural life cycle where you increase or decrease the rating of a track as it's appeal grows or shrinks. It should take time for a track to make it to five stars.
Thursday, December 03, 2009
I've owned an Xbox since it first came out in 2002 but last month I finally bought an Xbox 360 and retired the old console. Yeah, I know that's a long time.
Didn't buy a Wii as I'm not impressed with the graphics and the kinds of games on it. Fine for kids but I want to play too. I like the PS/3 and some of the exclusive games on it but I think it's too expensive for now. With the Xbox 360, the bundle price has fallen below £200 (Amazon). There's lots of cheap games around. The high def graphics look fab and it's backwards compatible with the games we already have. A no brainer really.
Another factor was that my kids are now getting old enough to play more of the teenager-oriented games on Xbox. My rule is that they can play up to the age level rating above their current age. My 10 year old son is allowed to play 12 rated games. My 14 year old daughter can play 15/16 rated games. I try to avoid them playing games with realistic violence with lots of blood and gore. It's better to kill aliens than humans or zombies.
My wife and I have played through Halo 3 in co-op mode and I'm working on Half-Life 2. The kids are playing Forza Motorsport, Lego Batman and Assasin's Creed (which is a bit too violent so my son can't play it). I'm not one for paying over £20 just for a game. I'm happy to wait for the price of new games to drop as there's a stupidly huge choice of older games to play. I would like to see more games with 2 player co-op modes.
I tried Xbox live. It's good for playing against others on the 'net but was surprised and disappointed how expensive the arcade style games were. These are disposable casual games and the pricing should be more like for iPhone games.
While the Xbox 360 really could use a motion controller, I'm hopeful Project Natal will go commercial. Even if it does, the Xbox 360 could still use a handheld motion controller for things like guns and swords.
There doesn't seem to be a replacement for the Xbox 360 coming anytime soon but I doubt this one will last 7 years.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Well after years of on again, off again research into my next stereo upgrade, I finally shelled out and bought a digital preamp, the Benchmark DAC1 PRE USB.
I had a few problems with my entertainment system that this box solves.
First, my Red Wine Audio modified Squeezebox couldn't drive my power amp through a passive attenuator properly so it lost a lot of bass and dynamics. Found this out by A/B ing with my CD player through a mixer.
Second, all my sources were digital but most have their own cheap crappy DACs. These include my Media PC, the Samsung TV and the Xbox 360. Most of the time, I'm using the Media PC as the source.
Third, just buying an external DAC doesn't help since you need to share it between multiple sources.
So the DAC1 PRE solves this as it can take 5 digital sourcse (1 USB, 1 optical toslink, 3 coaxial) and 1 analogue source. All these devices can then send their digital output via spdif to the superb electronics in the DAC1. There are loads of reviews around the 'net. I trusted them and bought it without listening first.
The output is via balanced XLRs or unbalanced RCAs. I need balanced XLRs to my power amp which reduced candidate DAC products dramatically as I didn't want an analogue preamp. There are very few DACS with a volume knob and XLR outputs and hardly any that support switching between multiple digital sources.
I now have my subwoofer attached in parallel via the unbalanced RCA output connection. This is great because it's a relatively dinky subwoofer and not any serious audiophile kit. I can leave it off for serious listening or put it on, if I want some thump or better explosions when watching a movie.
On top of this, I now have two headphone outputs. Handy when you get sick and tired of hearing sound effects from the kids playing on the Xbox 360! And the DAC1 can handle 24/96 sources so I'm ready for the next step in high fidelity like the new 24bit Beatles catalogue release.
Downsides?
For all that money, you think you might get a remote control volume? No! You need to pay another $300 for the DAC1 HDR. Fairly annoying but I'll live with getting up off the couch or digital muting to kill the TV ads.
Is it really worth it?
Well, I have done a preliminary A/B comparison again the Squeezebox built-in DAC and I must admit the difference is subtle - not a chorus of angels kind of revelation. Yes, it's better and more revealing but only if you really seriously listen to the details of the music. I haven't A/B'd all the sources.
I made my purchase through ebay with studioxchange. Their ebay prices are better plus I used a PayPal promotional discount to get it down to £1179 which was the best deal I could find.
I'm happy because now I'm sure that the weakest part of my stereo is the speakers. Would be nice to replace them with something from the Bowers & Wilkins 800 series...
Thursday, September 24, 2009
I received an iPod Touch as a gift about a month ago. Plenty has been written but I can't resist adding my own comments about this device and the iPhone.
I think the core factors that have made these products so popular are:
1) the finger gesture touch interface that's easy and consistent to use
2) simple mobile Internet access
3) a superb application distribution, install and update experience
These core factors have attracted ton of apps to be written and made it the clear winner as a mobile application platform for consumers. These three factors were missing from Microsoft's effort with the PocketPC. I still have an iPaq sitting in a box somewhere. The smartphone effort never got these factors together either.
The problem with the PocketPC is that it was designed as a companion device for a corporate PC. It was never a consumer device. It soon lost email, contacts and calendaring to the smartphone which was a better place for those apps. Finding, buying and loading apps onto the PocketPC was never that simple. I only bought one and that was a chess game. And applications that can communicate with the Internet offer far more potential than those that can't. The PocketPC came before finding Wifi hotspots was easy. The UI was quite good but it was never about being fun or entertaining. Recently, the only place I have seen PocketPCs being used is by taxi drivers in Athens as satnav devices.
Direct manipulation touch interfaces are the obvious success story for small devices. I've tried smartphone before but they have always felt too clunky navigating all the complex functionaliy. Touch interfaces fix that.
Apple doesn't have much real competition yet. Google's Android seems to coming along but it will struggle to get apps written for it. I believe Microsoft could have a good shot at competing if it would harness its .NET developers.
I would love to see a new device from Microsoft and its partners. Make it thin and half the size of an A4 piece of paper. Bigger than the iPod Touch but smaller than a Table PC. Give it a touch screen and a direct manipulation gesture interface. Let it run a variant of Silverlight or WPF that uses a specific application framework to make all apps navigate in a similar way. And then make it dead easy to build, find, share, download and update those apps. In other words, a big iPod Touch that runs .NET. I'd love that. And partner with Adobe to allow Flash apps. It's not a phone; it's a mobile app platform.
I've heard the rumours about Pink and efforts to shrink Microsoft Surface and reignite the Tablet PC. Zune isn't it. For the sake of competition I hope they can get it right this time. They could even call it a PocketPC.
UPDATE Jan 2010
Bought my wife an iPhone 16Gb 3GS and, of course, she loves it. However, the battery life isn't great and the reception is quite poor. I use the same mobile operator on an old Nokia and the reception is better.
I don't carry the iPod Touch around with me much as there are few public WiFi spots where I go and I don't need any other forms of entertainment. However, I've found the iPod Touch to be very good as a remote control for my Media PC using MonkeyTunes and HippoRemote.
I'm now very sure that a small tablet or slate is what I would really like. Call it a couch device. Looks like there will be a lot of these devices coming in 2010.
Monday, June 08, 2009
Just ordered a new printer after spending several hours researching them. Our old inkjet has packed up. Here's a quick brain dump of what I figured out.
I decided to go for a mono laser printer because it should be more reliable and cheaper to run. Colour is nice but it's expensive. Inkjets tend to dry up and get clogged unless you use them regularly. I think the ideal is to have both - a mono laser printer for your workhorse printing and a photo inkjet printer when you really want colour.
I also wanted duplex and networking abilities. Printers with networking usually have an N in the model number and those with duplexing have a D. I was hoping to get ND in the model number. Without these features, mono laser printers are dirt cheap. Add those features and the price rockets! The networking would be nice because then I wouldn't have to hang the printer off the server. But printers with networking are aimed at business workgroups so the price goes up. I gave up on networking but not duplexing.
My short list became the HP LaserJet P2055D, Kyocera FS-1300D, Lexmark E250D, E260D, E350D and the Samsung ML-3470D. I also took a look at the Brother HL-5340.
Next concern was running costs. The features sets are similiar and I assumed output quality would be roughly the same too. There might be big differences in how they dither and render a picture but it's beyond what I could find out. Reviews of printers are a bit slim around the Internet. Too many different models and it's not a very sexy chunk of technology.
HP LaserJet started as the favourite but it's the most expensive to buy and run. Between £27 and £19 per 1000 pages for the toner cartridge. Lexmark was also poor at between £26 and £17. Despite their popularity and rock solid drivers, they dropped to the bottom of my short list.
Brother is a bit odd since you have to replace the drum at 25,000 pages. If you run the printer until the drum is finished, it probably makes sense to replace the entire printer rather than buy another drum. But if you do add the drum cost, it's still only about £14 per 1000 pages. If I bought a Brother, I'm sure I'd just end up chucking the printer when the drum was dead so I struck them off the short list.
Kyocera has the cheapest running costs since they use a ceramic drum that doesn't need to be replaced. However, the brand is a bit obscure and the printer is on the expensive side. Looks well built. Doesn't have an LCD so you have to interpret flashing lights. Read the manual and wasn't overly impressed. The driver UI looked a bit clunky and lean. One nice thing is that you can find the optional network card on ebay for £10. Tempting. I'm a sucker for superior but obscure technology.
As you might have guessed, I went for the Samsung ML-3470. A big factor was that printerbase.co.uk had a great deal on selling it for only £160 whereas ebuyer was selling it for £284. Running costs are good - between £18 and £12 per 1000 pages. The manual read well and I liked the features of the printer driver. Samsung isn't a big player in the printer market they seem to be coming up.
While calculating running costs, I came to realise that those personal mono laser printers are very expensive to run because they use such small toner cartridges. No wonder they're so cheap! You can easily end up paying £25 and more per 1000 pages. You need to buy a laser printer than takes high capacity toner cartridges to get the running costs down.
Will update this post when it arrives and I test the print quality.
UPDATE 24 SEPT 2009
Been using this printer for a few months now and can confirm I'm very happy with it. It prints tonal shades in pictures very well. It's very reliable; had a jam only once when the paper tray got really low. The print driver is very nicely designed with excellent diagnostics. Speed is good as I'm nevery waiting by the printer. I'm very glad I got a duplex printer; wouldn't go back to a non-duplex printer.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
With a new HD TV, it was time to put together a
new Media Center PC. Here's a quick write-up on the build and a few niggles I ran into. It's based on a pretty standard configuration of an Antec Fusion Remote case with a Asus P5Q-EM running a Core 2 Duo E7400. Finally got a blu-ray drive in the form of a Pioneer BDC-S02.
Friday, May 15, 2009
My CPU was running hot even though it had Scythe Mine cooler and plenty of airflow. I was getting CPUID Hardware Monitor showing SYSTIN readings of 70 and CPU temperatures in the high 40's. It just didn't seem right.
So I guessed that those nasty Intel push pins the socket 775 weren't holding the cooler properly and decided to reinstall it using a Thermalright LGA775 Bolt-Thru-Kit ordered from Scan.
It was a bit of a fiddle trying to turn the screws hidden under the mass of the Scyte Mine but I eventually managed it. CPU temperatures are back down to the high 30's even after reducing fan speeds.
So a thumbs up for bolting down big cpu coolers.
Finally decided it was time to replace my 8 year old TV. Sad to say that I paid £2100 for my Sony KV-36FS70 and it sold on ebay for only £21! That's the price of progress.
It was quite a challenge figuring out what to buy and where to get it from. First stop was to flick through the AV magazines, create a short list, read a bit more and go to the shops and have a look.
While plasma is probably the superior technology, I decided it was too power hungry and the TVs were too heavy for the small advantage they provide. However, the bigger the TV you get, the more plasma makes sense.
A crucial issue was size. The bigger the better in my books but it's true you don't want a monilith sitting in the living room. I toyed with the idea of a projector but throw distance in the space I wanted it was too short and decent one is still quite pricey. Had to be LCD. A big consideration with getting a large TV is whether standard definition (SD) sources will look any good once you blow them up to that size. As my viewing distance was only about 10 feet, I settled looking at 40" to 42" TVs.
Didn't take long to narrow it down to either a Samsung or Sony as generally having the best reviews. For Samsung, it was going to be something from the 6 series or from Sony, it had to be a W range. Going around the shops, I have to admit there didn't appear to be much differences between them all. The differences are relatively subtle to my eyes even for fairly significant price jumps. The Samsung LED 7 series did leave a good impression but was too expensive.
I don't trust looking at TVs in shops that much as it only tells you what the default setting looks like with whatever source happens to be shown. It's not a great way to judge them. So back to the net and a trawl of the AVforums to figure out what was popular with the afficiados. This was followed by checking out the new products launched from each company, waiting for them to arrive in the shops, reading more website tests and then an extensive price search around.
It took a couple of months but I eventually bought a Samsung LE40B650T2 from UK Discount Electrical via a cash back through Quidco. I was quite influenced by the review on HDTVtest. This model replaces the LE40A656 which found much favour on avforums. I went for the newer model primarily because I wanted the new scaling chip hoping that SD sources would look better.
After using it for a month, I am still very pleased with this purchase.
First off, picture quality is excellent. Blu-ray was excellent and even SD sources look good. And it's got great connectivity options. Those are the two most important aspects of the TV to me and what sells it. Usability is top notch and pleasing to the eye.
The Internet connectivity is interesting but I'll never use it. I couldn't get it to work across my SqueezeBox WiFi bridge but it worked fine if connected directly to my router. One day, I can see these kind of features being useful but not in this incarnation.
The ability to play media direct from USB is a nice bonus. It displayed JPGs and AVIs that my wife had taken on her compact camera directly off a USB hard disk. Out of all the tricks the TV has up its sleeve, this is one of the better ones. You could easily watch a movie this way. One problem with showing pictures is that its clunky to rotate a picture if its the wrong way.
I have two complaints and both are about the sound.
First the sound is mediocre at best. I can live with it and it's good enough for just regular TV. I don't expect these thin TVs to sound that good anyway. However for movies, you really should plan on having external speakers.
Second, I hooked the TV up to my stereo using the analogue outputs. If you then have the audio coming out of both the TV speakers and the stereo, you hear a signficant echo effect. What's happening is the audio signal comes out of the analogue outputs first. Then the video signal gets processed which takes about 100ms. Then the TV speakers play the sound in sync with the picture. Now, if you watch the TV with only the stereo, there's a slight sync mismatch as you hear the sound slightly too soon. You can get used to it but its there.
If you have a proper AV preamp, you can compensate for this by delaying the sound. Personally, I feel this is a design flaw. The analogue outputs should be in sync with the picture display. Note that in game mode, the delay should drop to about 30ms.
So I would still highly recommend the Samsung LE40B650 as having a great picture especially if you watch standard definition source. But for sound, you should plan on having appropriate external equipment.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Last year I
blogged about a little wizard app I wrote that allows you to send HTML as an email. I got an email request for the source code, so today, I published the source on codeplex. You can find it as the
Send HTML Wizard.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
I've been mucking about with a little play app that solves sudoku puzzles. I know the first release is a bit naff but I published it on codeplex today. I needed some kind of source control before I evolve it further.
As a problem domain, it's quite nice for object-oriented programming and I've wound up using quite a few C# language features. I think the next step is to implement a Data Model - View - View Model pattern before trying out WPF animation.
One problem I've discovered working with a big monitor in a dark room is that white backgrounds kill your eyes. It's just blinding. The brightness is down at 10 out of 100 but it's still too much. I'm growing fond of dark backgrounds.
In Visual Studio 2008, I'm now using Dark Grey by Tomas Restrepo. Nice!
There's lots of talk about colour schemes around the 'net. Check out IDE Hote or Not?
Monday, September 15, 2008
Just finished
building a new office PC for a friend. Follow the link to read about it. It's based on a Silverstone TMJ08 mini-ATX case with a Gigabyte
Gigabyte GA-MA78GPM-DS2H (780G chipset) and a Athlon X2 4850e 2.5GHz CPU that has a TDP of only 45watts. It's a very nice office machine and would be excellent as an HTPC too.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
I've made it my goal to get back into hands-on software development. There's such a vast amount of software technology nowadays that the development choices are overwhelming.
There are three centers of gravity in development: .NET (Microsoft), Java (Sun/IBM) and Open Source (everyone else). You could add C++ and Flash (Adobe) in there too I guess. There's plenty of smaller communities. I'm sticking to .NET because I love the programming model, tools and choice of languages. And there's a good demand for contractors. Java and Open Source (eg. Ruby, Python and LAMP) have lots of great stuff too but you gotta start somewhere. I consider myself agnostic when it comes to platform wars.
But even with just .NET, there's a huge amount of areas to specialize.
So I've decided to concentrate on Rich Client development using Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight. Now, I know this isn't in vogue. Everyone seems to be doing ASP .NET with AJAX. Or if they're developing rich clients, it's still Winforms. And if you want to get paid more as a contractor, it's better to write backend code: WCF, WWF, SOA and all that database stuff.
But I like pushing pixels and I'm hopeful demand for WPF and Silverlight will be on the up and up. The barriers for using rich clients are coming down. Self updating apps are easy to write. Flash has proven that it's ok to have a 26Mb plugin if you only have to do it once. And the full .NET 3.5 client profile is only 60Mb which isn't much with fast broadband. Vista penetration will gradually improve. Mono & Moonlight will ship. The trends are right.
There will always be a place for HTML + AJAX apps. It's great for relatively simple and infrequently used apps or apps where you want to broadest accessibility. But it's an ugly programming model with an horrendous test matrix if you ask me.
I am dead pleased with my new 24" LCD monitor that I got yesterday. It's beautiful.
I've been researching LCD monitors and their technologies for a few months trying to make up my mind what to get. The best website on the topic that I found was www.tftcentral.co.uk. I wanted everything: 1920x1200 resolution, fantastic colours, wide gamut, lots of inputs, low latency, wide viewing angle, good technical support, a nice design, no dead pixels and not too expensive. Not a lot, right?
I often buy stuff by getting under the hood and choosing the best technology that those products use. With LCD monitors, there are 3 main technologies with a bunch of variants: TN film, *VA and *IPS. The bottom lines is that all the cheap monitors use TN film. They offer fast response times but colour and angle of viewing isn't so good. All the expensive colour critical type monitors use *IPS but there's very few of them on the market. Apple uses *IPS for their stuff. In between TN film and IPS, you get *VA which can be very good. So the strategy for me wasis to buy *IPS if you can or go for *VA.
There's an article on pchardwarehelp.com that tracks current S-IPS monitors on the market. Based on availability of the time of writing this, it boiled down to Apple Cinema Displays, Hazro or the HP LP2475W. Everything else is either no longer manufactures or not distributed in the UK. Over to *VA, the Dell 2408WFP is popular and there's the BenQ PF241W.
I was planning on buying the Dell 2408WPF but have been waiting for ages for the A01 firmware release to make it into the channel. It fixes the very poor latency of the monitor. I really like the Dell Ultrasharp pixel policy. If a pixel dies, you can get the whole monitor replaced.
Apple displays are based on a 2004 generation panel (according to Wikipedia) and have very limited connectivity. And they are expensive. Knock them off the short list.
I was very tempted to go with Hazro - the HZ24Wi - since they've updated the connectivity. They look fantastic. Only problem is that it's an obscure brand and a little expensive. The monitor stand isn't very adjustable either.
But HP released the LP2475W last month and it looks like a winner. It's based on the latest H-IPS panel and has tons of connectivity. It's everything I wanted. The stand is a little ugly but its fully adjustable. Read the review.
I have two niggles. First, I found a dead subpixel. Arrgghh. You know you want everything to be perfect. Of course, you can't see it. It's looks like a spec of dust. But it's there. The second thing is that the default callibration doesn't look good and now my problem is how to get the monitor callibrated.
After checking the reviews on frostytech.com, I purchased both the Scythe Mine and the Xigmatek HDT-S1283 to replace the cpu coolers on two of my pc's.
Both coolers are very efficient and quiet tower coolers that weigh in at about 500g. There are better coolers like the Scythe Zipang but I wanted to avoid their excessive weight.
I like the Scythe Mine better. The build quality is excellent. It's very quiet. I believe placing the fan between two towers of fins is a better design. There are a couple of drawbacks. It's uses grooves on the edge of 12cm fans to hold them in place. My favourite 12cm fan, Nexus, have a closed flange around the corners and won't fit. You have to modify them to slide it in. I haven't tried this. I also found the pins that hold it to the S775 motherboard kept popping out. It's difficult to install with the motherboard insitu.
The Scythe isn't any better than the stock Intel cpu cooler. By the way, the stock Intel cooler for 45nm cpu's are all aluminum jobs - not the copper hybrid you see in the frostytech review. That version comes with the 65nm cpu's. But the Sycthe is much quieter and I've used a Zalman fanmate 2 to drop the rpms from around 1500 to 1300. It reduces the tone of the pink noise nicely and leaves the CPU at about 40C. Overall, I'm happy with it.
The Xigmatek HDT-S1283 is cheaper and I suspect it performs better than the Scythe. Installing it on a S939 motherboard was not easy as the pressure bar kept trying to twist as I pressed the clamping lever. There's also nothing to hold the airflow deflector so I bent it a bit to hold it in place. The rubber mounting nibs that hold the fan were a bit of a fiddle too. On the plus side, it's easy to mount any other 12cm fan on it.
It's a bit noiser but that's because I haven't been able to reduce the fan speed yet. It comes with a 4 pin fan connector. On my motherboard, there's a capacitor that block using this with the 3 pin cpu fan header. And the Zalman fanmate 2 only connects to 3 pin plugs. I should have replaced the fan with a Nexus before I mounted it as it's too difficult to change the fan with it mounted on the motherboard.
So between the two, I'd recommend the Scythe Mine unless you're trying to save a bit of cash and have a motherboard with a 4 pin cpu fan header.
Monday, July 14, 2008
The Raid 1 setup in my server has been driving me nuts.
It failed to build so I figured it was time to replace the two Samsung 250Gb drives wth two Western Digital 500Gb Caviars Raid Edition 2's. I needed the extra space anyway.
I bought the drives from scan.co.uk along with a new 150Gb Raptor. After a pile of testing, they all proved to be duds and I RMA's them back. Couldn't believe I could get three bad hard disks in a row.
I got two more Western Digitals Caviars and went through more testing - mostly using the Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows. It's turns out that if there is one bad sector in either disk you're using to build a mirror, the build will fail. Read KB325615.
A bad sector can get remapped at both a file system level and by the hard disk firmware. For a RAID 1 build, it's got to be done at the firmware level. This requres the disk to first read and then write to that bad sector. I found that if I ran the diagnostic tool to do an extended test followed by a write zero's test, I could eventually get rid of a few bad sectors.
For one drive it took about 37 hours for each test. What a pain! It took about two weeks of messing about to finally get the RAID 1 drives rebuilt and loaded up.
UPDATE
I've given up on RAID 1. Now I'm just doing a weekly (or so) backup of the drive using "robocopy /mir". It's a fast and simple solution.
Friday, June 27, 2008
I've built myself a new main PC based on a Core 2 Duo E8400 and an Abit IP35 Pro XE. Here's the full article on the components and the build. I built my previous machine back in 2004 and was still running a P4 2.8 Northwood so I figured it was about time for an upgrade.
I've also made the move to Microsoft Vista Ultimate now that Service Pack 1 is out. The Windows Experience Index rates the overall hardware at 5.7. Everything is 5.9 except the E8400 which is 5.7. Complete rubbish! It should be 5.9 across the board.
Looking forward to overclocking it once I'm sure it's stable. I'd like to get it to 3.6Ghz and maybe even 4.0 like many others have.
Friday, June 13, 2008
I'm back in the UK and have been upgrading my home computing infrastructure. My first step was to upgrade my broadband connection so I switched from Plus.Net to O2 Broadband Premium after doing a bit of research on various UK plans.
O2 Broadband bought out Be Unlimited and offers an ADSL2+ network with download speeds of up to 20 mbps.
I've managed to get a connection of 13,272 kbps (down) and 1325 kbps (up) after getting the noise margin tweaked. It's awesome. Ping times playing online is down around 20ms! Downloads are unlimited. I'm about 1.5 km away from exchange.
The caveat is that to get these speeds, I've had to run wires right to the master socket. If I go through the extension line, the speed drops down to about 5 Mbps.
But the great news is that I'm paying less than I was before! There was no connection fee and I get a discount as an O2 PAYG customer and there's even a cashback through www.quidco.com. It's just £10 a month. Excellent value and I'm a happy customer.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Still travelling so that's why there's been a lack of posts. I just got back from China and Japan. Asia is in love with their mobile phones. It's no surprise that mobile apps is the future.
I've shopped around in various electronic shops and even cruised through Akihabara "electric city" but prices don't differ that much. In China its hard to tell because you have to go through a ton of haggling to find the real price. Japan wasn't cheap. I read an article on Tomshardware that places the US as one of the cheapest places to buy elecronics. I haven't found any great deals in Asia. You might get 10% off here and there. You mights as well just find somewhere that's tax free to get that kind of deal.