Category Archives: Hardware

Windows Media Center Edition 2005 doesn’t need wmlauch.exe

For those of you installing Windows Media Center Edition 2005 off MSDN disk 2429.4 (November 2005) and freaked out by it asking for a Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Windows XP SP2) disk, don’t worry: Just select the “skip this file and continue anyway” option because the install doesn’t need wmlauch.ex_ or wmlauch.exe – and I’m lead to believe that Windows XP SP3 will add it, or if not, Automatic Updates will. Just relax, and go with the flow.

I think that’s enough keywords, searching ought to find this now. Oh, hang on: Windows MCE 2005.

BTW, your XP Professional disk with integrated SP2 doesn’t hold the requested file, so don’t bother looking.

Five years on: VoIP? No. Well, maybe. But not really.

Five years ago we looked at dumping the POTS and going VoIP to save big dollars. It cost more to use VoIP.

So, recent events have suggested that moving to ADSL2+ is now a good idea. Now that the local loop is unbundled, true competition has smashed into the marketplace, and VoIP has finally gone mainstream. ADSL2+ prices are cheaper than ADSL. There’s dozens and dozens of VoIP providers, you can even port your existing POTS number to a VoIP number (for certain providers, from certain telecoms companies).

Interestingly, there’s a $10 difference between going with Naked ADSL2+ and ADSL2+ bundled with a home phone; typically you also lose some data allowance, for example going from 20Gig to 15Gig, and that 15Gig will have a further (quite small – I’ve seen an estimate of 30Meg/hr) amount consumed by ‘phone calls. So, you get less, and the question is, can you pull in VoIP functionality for less than the $10 price difference?

Well, maybe. If you insist on porting your existing phone number to the VoIP provider, there are charges (say $3/month), plus an upfront charge ($55). You’ll also need to acquire a convertery-thing to turn your Ethernet cable into a POTS connection for your existing phone handsets, or buy a network-connected VoIP phone, or whatever – some kind of connectivity to your network and thus the ISP and thus through to your VoIP provider is required. If you want a VoIP account with a Direct Inward Dialing (DID) number (you might know that as a phone number) they start at $5/month. So, of your $10 price difference, you’ve just chewed up $8. You get to amortize the connectivity hardware and charges over the $2 savings you’re making; if you’ve got the hardware lying around, the $55 port charge is will be clawed back in just 28 months. Did I mention you’re running with a smaller data allowance? And there’s also the cost of keeping the convertery-thing powered up each month. And the fact that if you lose you broadband connection, you lose your phone (POTS have very high availability rates; broadband not so much).

Now, admittedly, VoIP calls are hella cheap compared to POTS calls. If we made many, that might be a factor. But we don’t, so it’s not. Our phone line’s more for people to call us. If we wanted to place calls cheaply, VoIP accounts without DIDs start at $0; we’re looking at replacing the home phone, and the numbers still don’t stack up, even after all this deregulation and vastly increased competition. Which makes no sense.

Or maybe it does. If the costs are approximately at parity for VoIP and POTS, surely that’s showing that the prices are competitive?

Here’s another scenario. You go with POTS and ADSL2+, plus VoIP with a freshly allocated local number which you use for all outgoing calls. You still need the bridge, and now you need a second phone. You retire your POTS number (advise everyone you know of that you’ve changed numbers – doctor, dentist, home insurer, car insurer, friends, family, work’s HR department, your bank, etc etc – shouldn’t take more than a day or two), but keep it alive for, say, six months (this assumes your ISP loves the idea of you starting out with a POTS line and then dropping it after the six months; I haven’t checked, but I can guess what their reaction will be). You’re paying $15/month over naked prices (ignore bandwidth differences), but your call costs are lower. At the end of the six months you’re saving $5 a month, so another 12 months to break even, and then you can start amortizing the convertery-thingy at $5/month – about two years for every $100 it costs. And once that’s amortized, and you’ve recovered the price of the extra electricity you’ve been using, you’re making pure profit.

I can’t wait.

When the phone line is $5, or $8 for your existing number, rather than $30, that’s when it’ll make sense. But it’s almost at that price now, when you get down to brass tacks, it’s $10 plus they throw in a little extra bandwidth. So we’ve got a competitive situation (at least on the connectivity costs), and VoIP, as a result, sucks balls. Interestingly, bundled plans aren’t sold as “naked plus $10, and we’ll throw in some extra bandwidth!”.

Let’s say you were forced to change phone numbers anyway (perhaps an interstate move), so now it makes sense to go without the POTS number at all. You’ve still got to amortize the convertery-thingy at $5/month, but on the upside you’re saving money on your calls – if you make any.

Final analysis: if you’re forced to change you telephone number anyway, you might as well go Naked ADSL2+ and VoIP. Otherwise, not worth the bother.

Splitters!

TV splitterI want to share a TV signal between the VCR and the shiny new media PC.

So I went along to Dick Smith and bought a coax splitter thingy, pictured.

But why on earth does it have a male connection on the input, and a female connection on the output? I know cables vary, but surely it should assume the opposite?

It looks like the other one they stock is the same.

As it is, to make this work I’m going to need to use gender bender adapter thingies on all three connections. That’s just silly.

(Or have I somehow got myself some kind of unique antenna cable setup?)

iPad thoughts

Some thoughts on the iPad.

It looks like a giant iPhone. Having no lid to cover up the screen seems odd.

Some are ripping into its faults, including no iBook feature outside the USA (at least initially), no camera, no USB port, no memory card reader, no Flash support, no multitasking. Yikes.

But I do love the comments about the screen being bigger than an iPod/iPhone, like this is some revelation nobody thought of before.

“A larger screen means that games can be more immersive, as well as allowing for higher detail and bigger animations,” said Peters.

A bigger screen! Amazing!

You mean… just like every other notebook or desktop computer out there?

But hey, it does look pretty nice. I bet lots of people buy them.

I bet it could be almost as successful as the Apple Newton. *grin*

Printer prices still haven’t changed?

Christmas Eve, and following through on an idea I had six months earlier for fantastic presents, Fridge magnets and customized T-Shirts featuring smiling images of the whole family. Gifts like these would be well received by anyone blessed by them.

I’m not a big fan of inkjets, but several years ago we needed a scanner and the cheapest way of acquiring one was by buying one of those scanners with a free, built in inkjet printer. For some reason they’re sold in the printer section of the store. Knowing that inkjet cartridges don’t like sitting unused for extended periods, I didn’t install the cartridges. Until Christmas Eve 2009.

Things were going swimmingly well, with print-head alignment and test pages coming out, looking a little odd but they were very speedy drafts. A final print of a sheet of photos (well over 15 minutes to produce) didn’t come out so good. It was obvious yellow was missing. A few attempts to clean and clear the cartridge were attempted. One Christmas Eve, I decided to go shopping for a replacement colour cartridge. We’ve seen the movies. I knew what to expect.

From personal experience I can tell you that the afternoon of Christmas Eve isn’t all that crowded. Parking was bad, but not Boxing-Day-terrible. I picked the easy, undercover park that’s a substantial walk to the shopping centre, and all was good.

The plan was to check out cartridge prices, compare to new printers, and decide what to do. Turns out the inkjet pricing tactics haven’t changed since I bought the scanner. A replacement cartridge, just one of two required cartridges, was $45. A new printer, $48 (different brand). Given I didn’t know when the black was going to fail on me, I went with a new printer and fresh cartridges.

The new printer is much faster than the old one. And it came with same photo paper too. The T-Shirts could have gone down better, but the fridge magnets went down a treat.

I’d be annoyed

WTF? While iPhone users get their free upgrade to OS 3.0, iPod touch users have to pay US$9.95 for it?!

I’d be a tad annoyed about that.

Via Graham Cluley, who points out that it might have been nice if Apple had made the 46 fixed vulnerabilities available for free, even if you still had to pay for the other stuff.

iTunes with less bloat

(Part of my project to re-install my main home PC.)

I’ve been re-installing my main home PC, and trying to avoid putting junk on it.

iTunes 8 has blown out to a 70Mb download, up from about 20Mb just a couple of years ago with version 4, 33Mb for version 5, 35Mb for version 6, and 49Mb for version 7.

Part of the reason is that they bundle in a bunch of stuff: Quicktime, Bonjour (for networking), Apple Mobile Device Support (for iPhone and iPod Touch), MobileMe (for syncing with the service previously known as .Mac) and Apple Software Update (automatic updates, but includes shovelling in more stuff you don’t want).

The very intelligent Ed Bott investigated and found the following solution to cutting out the crap.

Download the iTunes setup. Then open it with an archive program such as 7-Zip or WinZip or WinRAR.

For people like me who have only old iPods, Nanos and Minis in the house, all you need is iTunes itself, and Quicktime. So extract and run the following:

Quicktime.msi /passive

iTunes.msi /passive
(For 64-bit: iTunes64.msi /passive )

…and that’s it. Done.

More details from Ed Bott — including what to do if you have an iTunes Touch or iPhone.

Psyb0t worm infecting modems/routers

The new “psyb0t” worm infects modem/routers by getting in via unsecured ssh/telnet ports on common MIPS Linux-based models such as those by Netcomm, Netgear and Linksys. Apparently a lot of these devices are shipped unsecured… and of course, most people don’t know how to check and change that. I know I don’t.

My router has DD-WRT on it. The DD-WRT web site has an article saying they believe they are not vulnerable, unless WAN management has been enabled.

It’s probably worth checking with your router or firmware provider to see if you’re vulnerable, and/or steps to check and secure your equipment.

APCmag: New worm can infect home modem/routers

ZDNet: ‘Psyb0t’ worm infects Linksys, Netgear home routers, modems

DRONEBL: Network Bluepill – stealth router-based botnet has been DDoSing dronebl for the last couple of weeks — which clarifies the conditions under which the infection can spread.

Copying your iPod MP3 collection onto a Windows PC via the iPod

I wanted an instant music collection at work, without installing iTunes or anything else, and without individually ripping the CDs. Fortunately all my CDs had been ripped to MP3 on my iPod, so I just took it into work and plugged it in.

Of course you don’t want to use iTunes, as that will mess it up completely, but as long as you can browse around the iPod’s files (eg you’ve switched-on Enable Disk Use), look into the \iPod_Control\Music directory (it’s hidden, so switch Explorer to view hidden files) and you’ll see iTunes has helpfully given random meaningless names to the MP3 files, such as F00\AJUR.mp3

No matter. Copy them to the new PC, and then drag them to Windows Media Player’s media library. It looks at the MP3 tags, which do match the actual artists and track names, and displays those in its library.

Done.

I knew there was a reason I encoded all my songs as MP3 instead of AAC. While there are hacks to get WMP to play AACs, officially it can’t — making it awkward to do on a corporate PC. I figured when I ripped them that MP3s are more widely supported, and perhaps more futureproof.

Saw a guy on the train with an old-style portable CD player. ‘Cos, you know, digital music from real CDs have a warmth that MP3/AAC on iPods just can’t match…

No more Pinnacle

It’s this kind of thing that Geekrant was devised for.

I’m boycotting Pinnacle products from here on in.

Pinnacle Studio 10 Plus is pretty good. Good enough that I don’t feel the need to upgrade to the latest and greatest. It handles all the video formats I use quite well. It grabs a lot of resources, but video editing always does. I’m happy with it.

BUT… the Pinnacle 310i capture card I have… it’s never worked well. As I have written before, the media centre program that came with it was horribly slow. The capture results were good, but I always had to keep an eye on the CPU usage, or it would start dropping frames.

(I bought it in the first place because Australian Personal Computer noted it in its Best Tech column. I’ve read that magazine for decades, and generally trust its opinions, but won’t be using that particular column for a recommendation again.)

Eventually I got it running with Virtual VCR, which is analogue only, but gave consistently better results.

Then a couple of weeks ago it died. Completely. No response.

After wrestling with drivers for a bit, I disabled it and went and looked for the Pinnacle 60e USB tuner I’d got as a freebie with Studio.

I tried it with some of the Pinnacle software, which was underwhelming. It’s DVB only, so wouldn’t work with Virtual VCR. So I looked around for freebie PVR programs, and found GB PVR.

GB PVR is one of those freebie media centre applications someone’s written. It’s reasonably responsive, if a bit bare-bones in places. It has some quirks, like it’s totally not designed to handle people operating it without a remote control… so for instance I haven’t found a way to record live TV manually; have to program it. And the timer only does 10 minute increments. Annoying.

Interestingly it seems to record the DVB-T stream directly onto the disk, leaving you with a TS file. This can be played using the K-Lite codec pack/Media Player Classic (VLC should play it too), and you can convert it using HDTVtoMPEG2 into a standard MPEG file to use in Virtual Dub and other applications. All good. (Well, as long as I tuned to the channels with the AC3 audio; some of the others required more fiddling to work.)

Once I figured out the quirks in GB PVR, I got absolutely outstanding quality recordings out of it. Really really clear, as you’d expect when working directly with the DVB stream. Fantastic.

Then the 60e stopped working. Un-#$&#ing-believable! Just stopped. GB PVR stopped doing what I asked of it. The logs revealed it couldn’t start the capture. Nothing would talk to it, tried uninstalling and re-installing, nope. Error 10 starting it up, whatever the hell that means. And the config screen reported there was now no capture device on the computer.

Dead.

Jeez.

Now, I might normally assume it was a problem with the PC. So I installed it on the other one. It worked for a couple of days, then also stopped.

So no more Pinnacle products for me.

Some of the Hauppauge capture cards look good. Alternately there are some new TVix products which double as standalone PVR/media player units.

Dave’s suggestion of going via Firewire is a good one that I’ll look at. Unfortunately my cheapie firewire video camera doesn’t have an input.

Bloody iTunes

WTF is wrong with iTunes? Why does it have so much trouble using a network drive as its Library? (Or it may be not so much it being on a network drive, as me daring not to put the library in My Music.)

It's continually telling me that it's lost some songs (apparently chosen at random that day, as it'll loose a few tracks off each album), or giving me an error along the lines of:

The required folder cannot be found.

Oh, brilliant. WHICH FREAKING FOLDER ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? At least give me a clue so I can go looking for what the problem is.

Oh yeah, the problem is actually at Apple; their Windows team just can't get this right.

Ejecting and re-connecting the iPod temporarily fixes it, but it took three or four goes of this to get the sync finished. Very annoying.

iTunes goes DRM-free

According to the AU iTunes store, for AU iTunes users, the cost to convert your existing iTunes purchases to “iTunes Plus” DRM-free 256kbps AAC is:

  • $0.50 (inc GST) per song
  • 30% of the current album price
  • $1.00 per music video (same quality)

From the looks of it, not all music is yet available in the iTunes Plus format.

Thanks to Apple's reluctance to specifically show the iTunes software version on the download page, it's not clear to me if everyone needs to upgrade, or if recent versions can skip upgrading. (I'm running 8.0.1.11 — it appears to be sufficient?) It may also mean problems for people with moderately old (pre-OS X 10.4) Macs.