A Byte Of Life

Samsung ML-3470D Mono Laser Printer

Ian Wijesinghe — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 23:21:09 GMT

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.

Media Center PC Project 2009

Ian Wijesinghe — Sun, 17 May 2009 20:35:25 GMT

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.

Thermalright LGA775 Bolt-Thru-Kit

Ian Wijesinghe — Fri, 15 May 2009 10:44:15 GMT

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.

Samsung LCD TV LE40B650

Ian Wijesinghe — Fri, 15 May 2009 10:29:50 GMT

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.

Send HTML Wizard on CodePlex

Ian Wijesinghe — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:46:56 GMT

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.

Joyze Sudoku Solver Beta 1

Ian Wijesinghe — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:07:18 GMT

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.

Visual Studio Colour Schemes

Ian Wijesinghe — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:36:07 GMT

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?

Quiet Office PC 2008

Ian Wijesinghe — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:48:49 GMT

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.

Back to Rich Client Development

Ian Wijesinghe — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:45:26 GMT

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.

HP LP2475W 24" LCD Monitor

Ian Wijesinghe — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 10:13:18 GMT

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.

Scythe Mine vs Xigmatek HDT-S1283 CPU Coolers

Ian Wijesinghe — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 09:28:05 GMT

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.

Mirror, Mirror Drive Me Nuts!

Ian Wijesinghe — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:40:16 GMT

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.

New Vista PC 2008

Ian Wijesinghe — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:35:01 GMT

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.

O2 Broadband

Ian Wijesinghe — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:04:36 GMT

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.

World Electronics Prices

Ian Wijesinghe — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:45:49 GMT

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.

Internet cafe's

Ian Wijesinghe — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 10:08:31 GMT

I travelled for 7 weeks around Europe and it was quite a struggle to find Internet cafe's. Wifi hotspots are common but it was rarely conveniet to find an Internet cafe. It was also a bit of struggle to use European keyboards that swap the Z and Y keys. You use those letters more than you think! We also found more than one hotel that offered an Internet connection using an old PC and browser which typically aren't supported anymore.

But in Kuala Lumpur its a different story and I suspect much of Asia is the same. Internet cafe's are still in vogue.

Freebox

Ian Wijesinghe — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 10:03:35 GMT

We rented an apartment in Paris for a week and it came with a Freebox. I did a double take when the lettings agent mentioned that we could make international calls for free. Really? And it was true. I called Canada and no bill ever turned up for it. It can even do HD TV and digital radio. Superb. Wish we had them in the UK.

Which Nikon Zoom Lens?

Ian Wijesinghe — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 08:43:33 GMT

I bought my first digital SLR camera last week. I used to shoot a Contax film SLR many years ago before going for a digital compact camera. Early DSLR's were way too expensive.

But the DSLR market has many good cameras now for a reasonable price. I knew from the start it was going to be either a Canon or a Nikon because of their reputations and breadth of quality lenses that both offered.

I went for the Nikon D80. I reasoned that I wanted more than the entry level cameras (D40x and 400D) so that left either the Canon 30D or the Nikon D80 and D200. I liked the D80 as it wasn't very heavy compared to the other two and offered all the features I needed. It was an easy choice.

However, choosing the lens has been really hard. I want to travel light so I really just want a single zoom lens. That also avoids getting dust in the camera through lens changes.

My first choice was the AF-S 18-200 VR but after a day of shooting I was pretty disappointed by the lack of sharpness - particularly on the long end of the zoom. It didn't seem much better than a compact camera and I was expecting a lot more sharpness from a DSLR. On macro shots, it just didn't show up surface textures that well.

I returned it to Kerrisdale cameras (in Victoria, Canada) and tried another copy of the same lens just in case the one I had was a dud. Nope - the second one was lacking too. I have since read up on the internet and found quite a few people complain that its a soft lens at either end of its range but that's the sacrifice you make when you have cheap consumer glass and a huge zoom range. The build quality is also lacking. I have to say the 18-200 zoom range is fantastic for a travel camera.

Instead, I'm now using the AF-S 18-70 kit lens. It's 1/3 the price and has a respectable 4x's zoom range. But I'm still not impressed with the sharpness. Maybe I'm expecting too much? At any rate, it's supposed to be better than the other kit lens which has a 18-135 zoom range.

I've been tempted to splurge on the AF-S DX 18-55 2.8 G IF ED lens but its horrendously expensive, very heavy and covers quite a short zoom range. There are many people raving about how good it is.

So I'm stuck with the 18-70 until Nikon creates a better walkabout lens for me. I'd like them to invent something like an AF-S DX 18-105 VR ED. Take the current kit lens, add a little bit more range, add VR, add pro glass and voila, it would be almost perfect.

Epson Perfection V100 Photo Flatbed Scanner

Ian Wijesinghe — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 23:58:02 GMT

I bought an Epson Perfection V100 Scanner last week.

I needed to scan some documents that I wanted to take travelling with us. That was my main motivation. But its been on my mind to get one for a while now. Scanners are just plain useful. The big project I want to do is scan all my 35mm slides and negatives but I've been humming and hahing about what's the best scanner to get for a couple of years. I mean I only ever want to scan all that film I have once and that's it. Flatbed scanners like the Epson V700 seem to be able do the job as well as dedicated (low end) film scanners. As always with technology, it pays to wait since it just gets better. Buy only when you need it.

Since I'm not about to embark on a film scanning project for at least another year, I just needed something cheap and cheerful for document archiving. The V100 does a great job and it's only £60. I wouldn't use it for scanning film or photo's but it fine for any kind of document.

The V100 has an optical resolution of 3200 dpi. The next scanner in the product line is the V350 which has an optical resolution of 4800 dpi. I'm willing to bet that the electronics in both products are exactly the same and the V100 just has an artificial limit. You can see where I'm going right? I'm sure there must be a hack that would enable the V100 to scan at 4800 dpi. Tell me if you know how.

There are cheaper scanners but I was particularly impressed that the V100 is supported by SilverFast. They're well known as making pretty much the best scanning software around. That made it an easy decision.

Samsung YP-T9 MP3 Player

Ian Wijesinghe — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 21:06:33 GMT

I mentioned before that I bought a Samsung YP-TP mp3 player. I just want to say I've been very impressed with this device. It's very easy to use and the battery lasts a long time. I just upgraded to the v1.6 firmware and it now supports bookmarks. This is perfect for the lectures I listen to from The Teaching Company.

Great little device and its now come down to £105 on Amazon UK.

There are some negatives. The file transfer is a bit slow. My daughter did manage to crash it once but I've never done it. I wish it could play quicktime movies since that's what my digital camera creates. But I consider video on this size of device just a novelty anyway. I also wish these mp3 players would support a line out so it would be easy to connect to an amplifier. The earphones it came with are rubbish but that's always the case. I need to replace them.

I've also bought the Media Monkey Gold version (with Lifetime Updates). It works just fine with the YPT9 although you do need to install Windows Media Player 10 or above for the device to get recognized.

Hyperdrive Space

Ian Wijesinghe — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 20:47:33 GMT

I'm off doing some travelling soon so I finally bought a photo storage solution - a Hyperdrive Space direct from their Hypershop. I bought the version without a hard disk so I could whack my wife's old harddisk into it. It's only 40Gb but it's good enough for now. The shipping added about £15 and then there was another £25 for duty and customs clearance. Ouch!

But I quickly got it working. It does exactly what is says on the tin. I like it. Simple and fast. I haven't really had any chance to use it in earnest but I'm confident it will be fine. Eventually as technology moves on, it will just wind up being an external hard disk with built-in card readers. I figure it will be a long time before I need to dump it.

I did consider getting a mutimedia viewer device and was very tempted by the Vosonic VP8360. No point going to the VP8390 due to the short lifetime of an OLED display. But the VP8360 had some good reviews and has an upgradeable hard disk and battery. You get extra functionality but trade-off useability, speed and battery life.

With all these specialty devices, I find a lot of it boils down to battery life and rock solid firmware that you can trust. I'd rather have a device with less features that I can trust really works. From reading around the 'net, I got the feeling the hyperdrive did what it did well while the Vosonic had more issues. Multimedia viewers also have a much shorter lifetime before they get outdated.

Unless some fabulous media viewer device comes to market, I expect I'll buy a Ultra Mobile PC one day to do that job. It's more functional and futureproof than a dedicated multimedia viewer. I hope Intels new 2007 platform for the 2nd generation of UMPC will see some great products coming to market. The 2006 platform certainly didn't cut it.

A2DP or not to A2DP?

Ian Wijesinghe — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 23:09:05 GMT

I've been flirting with A2DP for the last few months and have generally decided its a bad idea.

The main motivation was that my wife wanted to listen to podcasts and audio books in the kitchen. First, I got some A2DP speakers (from the Orange shop) and a Bluetooth USB stick. I got the old "Amazon 3rd party not in stock" trick which got me a USB Bluetooth 1.1 stick that I didn't want. Wasn't impressed with the usability of the BlueSoleil software but it worked as long as the laptop was in line of sight of the speakers.

I bought another Bluetooth USB stick - this one a version 2.0 spec. It was actually worse with some random cutouts. The Widcomm drivers were more user friendly but weren't reliable. But the line-of-sight issue made it useless. Even a jug of water or a person standing in the way would cause drop outs.

My wife bought a Sony Ericsson W850i walkman phone. The A2DP worked fine but she found it hard using the software that you use to put music on the phone. While passing through an airport, I bought a Samsung YP-T9 mp3 player (with A2DP support) on a bit of a lust whim. It worked well with the A2DP speakers and its simple enough to load with music.

But when you boil it down, it's a pain turning on and binding A2DP connections. At home, its just as easy to plug in a wire. When the YP-T9 is transmitting, it turns very sluggish which I suspect is due to the processing overheads. That's gotta kill the batteries.

I also find it annoying that A2DP is sold as "CD quality". It's not. It's 320kps. That ain't bad but its not CD quality. A piece of wire gives better quality and doesn't kill your batteries.

For the home scenario of remoting audio, its better to use WiFi. The only scenario where A2DP might be worth it is in a car. However, I decided its not worth spending £150 on a new stereo head just to get this feature. Instead, I bought a AudiaX DGT-202 FM transmitter for £23. It's not the greatest solution but its simple, inexpensive and it works in any car.

I've sold the A2DP speakers and my wife just moves her laptop.

Microsoft Introduces Dynamic Language Runtime

Ian Wijesinghe — Tue, 01 May 2007 22:51:10 GMT

If you haven't heard, check out the new Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR). Awesome. It's been a long time since I've been excited by a technology.

I thought it was about time Microsoft brought something like Silverlight out. There have been numerous Microsoft projects trying to introduce new UI technologies that never got released. With Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight, Microsoft has firmly put up a neon sign showing how to construct the next generation of rich user interfaces. It solves the Rich Internet App (RIA) puzzle.

But the DLR vastly improves this proposition. RIAs, installed on demand, built with your favourite dynamic (or static) langauge and that run fast! Yes! It's what I've been waiting for. Well, I hope the reality checks out when I start diving into the details.

This will relegate ASP.NET and AJAX to pure breadth applications. I've always felt AJAX was a kludge. Libraries built on JavaScript just doesn't feel right. To me, AJAX is an indictment of stifled browser development.

Now what about Adobe Flash?

This will be interesting. Flash is way, way, way ahead. It won't die or disappear. The tool and community support is phenomenal. Flash will always have greater runtime breadth and a great choice for media delivery. But Silverlight + DLR will put a big dent in the Flash + Flex for business RIAs proposition. It wouldn't surprise me if Flex dies in a few years.

XXCOPY

Ian Wijesinghe — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 11:20:39 GMT

Just discovered this great little utility from Pixelab Inc. Succintly described as xcopy on steroids, it's a command line tool with a huge array of options. What I like is this one:

XXCOPY M:\SOURCE\ E:\DEST\ /CLONE

which synchronizes a destination directory with a source directory ignoring files that haven't changed and deleting files no longer in the source. It's a much easier way to backup my data files - especially my photos and music. Just gotta put a few of these lines in a batch file for a dead simple backup method.

Send HTML page as email body

Ian Wijesinghe — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 12:10:50 GMT

A few months ago, I wrote a small .NET application I've called the Send HTML Wizard. It was cool doing a bit of coding in C# again and actually finishing it.

Download Send HTML Wizard

To install, you just need to unzip and run. You will need the Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 installed on your machine as well.

The wizard prompts you through five steps:

Get your SMTP server information
Get the path to an HTML file on your local hard disk
Get the list of TO and CC recipients you want to send the message to
Get the message subject line and alternative body text
Send

Then it creates an email message using System.Net.Mail encoding the HTML file as the message body. It will embed any files that are linked using href=, src=, dynsrc= and background= tags. These embedded files don't even show up as attachments.

I originally did this for a friend to see whether we could embed video and play it in-situ within Outlook. It could be done with the dynsrc tag and IE 6 but IE 7 tighted up security and killed it. However, it's still useful as a way of sending HTML email. The other way is to use Outlook signature files.

The app is flagged as beta since that's the level of quality you can expect. I haven't done any extensive testing and don't plan any further releases.

The app makes use of the Wizard Framework dll by Divelements which is included in the zip file. It made it much easier to code and works well.