Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

Looks like the SIP is better than I have previously claimed. Incoming SIP calls are indeed appearing just like any others.

The problem I’m having seems to be with calls within the same VOIP service, and it’s probably going to turn out to be a firewall config issue.

On a quick call this morning there was a bit of breakup, but that was most likely due to interference on the 802.11g connection the phone is using. That sort of thing may simply be unavoidable, though a newer (better?) wireless AP might help — still using an early-gen Linksys WRT54G.

Now looking for a screen zoom tool that doesn’t come bundled with Mobile Speak and which doesn’t cost a small fortune either. Not that I’ve looked very hard so far.

Am noticing that the keyboard really is vastly superior to entering messages via a regular numeric pad. I can bash out a literate message pretty quickly without needing my glasses on to do it.

The interface does rather lack polish compared to Apple’s efforts, but it does work pretty well. Overall, if you’re looking for something that does OK with text but don’t need Exchange support, I’d say go for this. If you need Exchange support, my understanding is that this is still very much a “first generation” attempt at that, so you’re probably better off with a Blackberry. The Bold looks purty.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Tags: Phone, Tech by matt
1 Comment »

Got it this morning, so this is not what you’d call a complete review.

Nice build quality. Getting the back cover off was a bit of a trial, not sure if that’s because I’ve got big fingers or because it’s meant to be difficult, but it’s not something you do often.

The keyboard is pretty decent. I’ve not used a QWERTY phone before so can’t compare it with the competition. But it’s hugely more efficient for text entry than a simple numeric pad. Takes some getting used to though as the keys are necessarily quite small.

The screen is very pretty, but a lot of the text is fairly small even with the font setting set to “large”. I’m not sure if anything at all pay any attention to that setting. On the bright side it’ll read out incoming messages, though bizarrely that option isn’t available for stuff in your sent folder.

I chucked a demo copy of Mobile Speak on it but frankly that’s more irritating than squinting.

My one real complaint is with the SIP support, which was one of the factors that made me decide to get a Series 60 phone. Outgoing calls seem to be OK — though I’ve had some trouble there too — but incomings are particularly irritating. The handset doesn’t seem to reliably stay registered so it misses calls, and even when it receives them they aren’t treated like normal calls: you can’t answer simply by pressing the call-answer button, and they don’t appear in the call logs.

This is a bit of a bummer as I’d been hoping to use this as a “one handset to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them”. Turns out not so much.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Tags: Tech by matt
2 Comments »

I realised this morning that there is no particular reason to keep what had been running as the “house server” powered up any more: the data it had has been moved to the mirrored disks on the iMac, and moving the web proxy across is a doddle.

So now the only machine on in the house is the iMac, and that’s sleeping when not in use. It’s odd but satisfying to not have the hum of computers around all the time — I’ve been wanting to consolidate everything on one machine for years and it’s now finally been done.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Tags: Uncategorized by matt
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• It’s wonderful to have a decent screen-zoom tool that works properly with pretty much everything;
• The huge screen is taking some getting used-to, mostly because it means I no longer have to be so hunched over to comfortably use the system.  Where I can increase font sizes I do, and where I can’t I use the screen zoom.  Will do wonders for my posture once I get used to it;
• Firewire on the cheap external enclosure I bought is a bit of a dud, so I’ve had to hook that up via USB2 instead.  But that’s adequate for a Time Machine disk.  The real data is going on a mirrored pair of 1TB disks hooked up via Firewire;
• Full-screen Flash video runs smoothly.  That had been a small concern, as it’s pretty lousy under Linux and had been so on the old G5 iMac too;
• Having watched a few things with iView, if I didn’t already have a larger TV and a TiVo I think I could probably be happy enough using this for whatever TV-viewing I wanted to do.  A very viable option in a small flat;
• Warcrack runs beautifully, as it ought.  Portal runs quite nicely under Crossover, the other things I wanted to fiddle with (Bioshock, Mass Effect) don’t, but it was a doddle to set up XP under Boot Camp, so worst case there’s always that option;
• MacTheRipper seems to have disappeared from the net.  The “official” site is still there but the download mirrors appear to be dead.  Oh well;
• Really not enough USB ports!

Popularity: 28% [?]

Tags: Mac by matt
2 Comments »

The Dell tech showed up this morning to get the DVD out of the laptop drive. This particular model has no manual eject. He showed up when he said he would and did a good job, so I’m pretty happy with that aspect of the experience.

The drive itself was clearly a kung-fu master as it snapped the disk in half.

I now have an external USB2/Firewire 5.25″ enclosure into which I have whacked a spare (tray loading!) DVD-RW unit so this particular problem shouldn’t recur.

The iMac (now named ladybird) also arrived this morning. Lovely lovely bit of kit. The only slight hitch is that with the fonts cranked up as large as I want there isn’t quite enough room for, say, a web browser and a chat window on a single virtual desktop. On the other hand, damn big fonts!

Popularity: 24% [?]

Tags: Random by matt
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Today’s great joy is discovering that:

1. a rental DVD got stuck in the drive on my laptop; and
2. there’s no hardware “emergency” eject.

All optical ejections on the Dell XPS M1530 are done in software.  Older Apple units used to have a pin-push hole so you could trigger an eject, but not this machine, nor it turns out after a bit of reading, current Apple machines.

The drive does not believe it has any media, and seems to be too smart for its own good: if it doesn’t think there’s anything in there, it ignores soft-ejects!

Getting the thing out of the drive would seem to require a service call.  I’ve lodged a case, fortunately I’ve got the at-home support so with any luck they’ll arrange to have someone come out in the next few days to open the machine up and extract the disk.

Longer-term, I’ve ordered a 5.25″ USB2 enclosure and I’ll stick a spare tray-loading DVD-RW drive in that.  Will use it with the iMac too, no point risking further irritation from this sort of crap.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Tags: Random by matt
2 Comments »

Have had this for a couple of days now. Not long enough to comment on reliability, but otherwise…

The main area where the service is let down is the guide data. Repeats aren’t always marked as such — for example Four Corners’ ABC1 repeat isn’t marked as a repeat so a season pass for Four Corners on ABC1 will get you both runs.

It’s not specific to channels. Ten has some of this right — this week’s SVU is a rerun and is marked as such, this week’s House is also a rerun and is not marked. IceTV has got this consistently right for quite a while now with no co-operation from the networks, TiVo should be able to do so as well — this is not the US, there aren’t hundreds of channels to handle and anyone who is paying attention can tell if an upcoming episode is a re-run without needing to have that flagged by the network.

To add insult to injury, the online Yahoo7 guide gets this right!

My other concern is with how consecutive recordings are handled. The software is fairly naive — if you’re recording shows X and Y consecutively on the same channel it’ll use the second tuner for the second show. Which is a bit of an issue if that’s already in use.

They’ve got a reasonable system for conflict resolution, but this is one of those cases where I’ve gotten used to the way TED+ handles this when it sets up timers on a Topfield PVR: it’ll set up a single timer event for both shows so while they’re both in a single file you’re only using a single tuner to get there.

With TiVo what you get is one of the consecutive recordings being truncated. The content is still there — it’ll be in the next recording — but it does rather break the flow of the program.

A better way to handle this would be to write the overlapping portion to both files from a single tuner. Fairly simple conceptually but how difficult it would be to implement would depend on how they’ve structured their code.

Some option to change the default pre- and post- padding times would be nice. You can enable post-padding but it’s a simple on/off, and for some reason doesn’t get switched on for ABC channels. Unfortunately not only do our commercial networks often run late, even when they do run “on time” they have different ideas about what that means. So you generally want to start 3-5 minutes early all the time. You can change this yourself per season pass or recording, but it’d be lovely to be able to set defaults in more detail.

Anyway, other than the guide data being a bit off I’m pretty happy with the device. More storage would be nice, and it’s a pity they’re holding off on releasing the extender units here — I’m a bit dubious about replacing the internal disk while it’s still under warranty. The lack of network media stuff doesn’t bother me much but then I’ve got a hacked AppleTV for that.

One final note: this device doesn’t seem to get particularly hot, which is a nice change from the old Topfield unit.

Popularity: 35% [?]

Tags: TiVo by matt
2 Comments »

1. Download and install VirtualBox;
2. Install Windows XP in a VM;
3. Install Firefox and/or Opera in the VM;
4. Install Flash in the VM;
5. Profit!

It’s not just that Firefox is pushing Xorg to eat all the CPU and starving other applications so much that music will stop playing in Rhythmbox, though that’s the biggie for me. Fonts look better, Flash video plays reasonably well — still a little jittery fullscreen but less so than with the native Flash — and Opera obeys the system font settings for menus and dialogs.

Popularity: 44% [?]

Tags: Linux, Tech, Ubuntu, inflammatory by matt
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In the interests of being balanced…

Rythmbox “just works” playing stuff off my DAAP server. It hasn’t crashed on me (yet). All the hardware in this machine (Dell XPS 1530) seems to be supported, though I haven’t tried the fingerprint scanner or the webcam. I did have to poke about a bit to get audio output going as there are two output devices and the system muted the analog output by default.

It’ll be a perfectly acceptable “work” system, so if I can iron out the display stuff from my previous post I’ll probably just keep this laptop running Ubuntu.

Popularity: 41% [?]

Tags: Linux, Tech, Ubuntu by matt
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Couple of things I’ve yet to resolve:

• Can’t get the WineHQ version of Wine to do anything more than crash when trying to run WoW;
• Crossover Games runs WoW at a really nice framerate, not a great deal different to Vista on the same hardware. Unfortunately I can’t quite convince it to do audio if anything else at all is doing so;
• rdesktop “feels” slower than the Windows RDC client talking to the same machine via the same ssh tunnel. There’s probably something tweakable, it’s not Ubuntu-specific — this is the usual default for rdesktop;
• Haven’t yet figured out how to get the system to default to the display settings I want: ignore the builtin LCD, use the external one at 1280×1024. I can set it this way after login (fn-F8 twice, then run the nVidia settings doover and fix the resolution) but logout and it resets to the internal at 1400×900;
• Apps — Firefox in particular — don’t behave very well when there’s high I/O load. Copy 8GB of files from one part of the filesystem to another, watch Firefox turn grey;
• Firefox is really not liking Facebook. At all. It works, mostly, but gets really slow. This is not so on Windows or OS X.

I wouldn’t mind resolving at least some of these, but none of it is troublesome enough to be a major priority given that I’ve got a new iMac on the way.

Popularity: 40% [?]

Tags: Linux, Tech, Ubuntu by matt
3 Comments »