Category Archives: Gadgets

New Laptop

Posted on by
1

A funny sequence of events resulted in me trying a Thinkpad X40 as my work laptop (replacing the T41p that I had been using). The X40 is slower, has less HD space and a lower resolution screen, but it is smaller and lighter.

First job was to remove WIndoze XP and replace it with Fedora Core 4. That was painless (assuming you have the media tray piece that adds the optical drive). Getting some other things setup took a little longer. I ended up with the MadWiFi driver from their old sourceforge project CVS. Running on top of that is Devicescape‘s Secure Wireless Client (basically wpa_supplicant) and its associated GUI (seen in the screen shot).

I also have gdesklets to provide some desktop utilities like the calendar, world time clocks and Wi-Fi status indicator. And then the desktop wallpaper, which I got from a Novell site, and shows Tux trying to swat a Microsoft butterfly.

Digital Rights Management

Posted on by
1

In an article titled Music lovers caught in DRM battle, on the BBC News web site there is a quote from one Brad Duea, the president of Napster, where he states:

So we try not to view the DRM as something that limits consumers but instead enables them now to take all their music on the go.

I don’t know where he’s been living, but the last time I checked my legally purchased (on CDs), but non-DRM’d music worked just fine in my portable music player (an iPod). I don’t see how adding DRM would enable me to do anything more with that music than I do today. I can see how it would let me do less…

Now, as someone who works with intellectual property (both as a software engineer and as an amateur photographer), I do not agree with people using IP without permission (a license). There are a few problems with DRM technology though:

  1. When the licenses become more restrictive (as many software licenses are today), then people will find ways around them. If music becomes as restrictive as software, which it would seem the DRM technologies are moving in the direction of, then more people will circumvent them and piracy will increase, not decrease.
  2. DRM technologies will only restrict what honest paying customers can do; those intent on pirating the music will always be able to get around the DRM.
  3. Having multiple DRM technologies, and multiple audio formats will mean that consumers will be forced to stay with one hardware vendor. If my iPod breaks, I have to get another one because nothing else will play the songs I buy from iTunes. Or I can pay for the music again in a different format.

The current situation is not good for anybody. There will always be people who copy music (and software, and photos and other forms of intellectual property). Some of the recipients of those copies might actually like what they hear and buy it, or buy other things from the same artist. Remember the music industry hated radio and the cassette tape when they appeared, but long term I would say they have been good for business (and we won’t even get into the movie industry and the VCR). Sharing music is a form of promotion. The majority of the people who don’t buy more music having heard some for free, wouldn’t have bought it anyway. Either they didn’t like it, or they couldn’t have afforded it in the first place.

If the music industry was feeling brave, they might like to try something like the shareware software scheme: they could make some of their music available, unprotected and in MP3 format, perhaps at a lower bit rate than most people would use. This has a couple of key advantages:

  1. It acts as a great promotional tool (try before you buy always works well with IP). Consider this to be radio for the iPod generation.
  2. It reduces the need to pirate the songs since they are available legitimately for free, thereby taking some of the pirate’s market away.

Perhaps software like iTunes and WMP could read a tag from these unprotected tracks and display an upgrade button in their library browsers. Press the button to buy a higher quality version of the track, or a different version of the track. Buy enough and you get bonus tracks; or buy five upgrades, get five upgrades for free; or whatever – the possibilities here are endless, if only the industry has the guts to take a chance on it rather than circling the wagons and trying to annoy their most loyal customers in an effort to prevent people who were never their customers from doing what they’ve always done, and will continue to do regardless.

Of course, they’ll never do it as it would be too radical a move for what is at times an oddly conservative industry. Unless one of them does it… Sony: you’ve been bitten by DRM, how about it? How about trying something different, and a little revolutionary?

Beer Pouring Machines

Posted on by
Reply

RobotIn the United Red Carpet Club lounge in Narita airport is a beer pouring machine [Quicktime] that you load a glass into, taken from the adjacent refrigerator, press the button and watch as it gently tilts the glass and pours beer into it. As it nears the top, it gently moves back into the vertical position, and then finishes up by adding a head to the beer from a second nozzle. The movie clip, from my cellphone, is not quite long enough to catch this last step, but you get the idea.
I took the video while I was there earlier today waiting for my flight back to San Francisco. When I got home, I found an article at Gizmodo describing a robot that Asahi is giving away that will pour beer for you.

GSM Phone in Japan

Posted on by
Reply

So, this time in Japan I needed to have text message capabilities in order to keep in touch with my girlfriend who was also travelling in Asia (and not able to get to landline phones or a computer with internet access to check email very easily). With a little help from my friends in our Japan office, we discovered that NTT DoCoMo rents 3G GSM handsets that will work with the SIM card from my Cingular GSM phone, and they are pretty reasonable price-wise too, especially if you can book in advance using their online form.

The phone that they have is a Motorola A835. On the positive side, it worked in Japan, the screen is really good (and large) and the predictive text learns the words you use and auto-completes them in future. On the negative side, it is huge, has a really poor quality camera (well, two of them actually) and perhaps the world’s second worst user interface (e.g. the key to confirm an action will change from one confirmation to the next, even within the same application). It also kept dropping off of the NTT DoCoMo and either telling me it was on Vodafone or that it was in emergency call only mode (I don’t know how that came about since I assume it needs a network for that still). In many cases it would splash the list of networks on the screen and wait until I picked the one I wanted. Not useful when it was sitting in my pocket so I didn’t know it was needing my help. I am still not clear whether it was offline while this screen was displayed, or whether it auto-connected in the background and just didn’t have the smarts to take the question screen away.

That said, both calls and text messages worked to and from the phone using my US number while I was in Tokyo. Hopefully the next phone I get will be 3G capable (assuming the US networks get their act together sometime soon), then I won’t need to rent a brick to do this.

GP2X Personal Entertainment Player

Posted on by
1

I ordered one of these a while back from the UK in fact (I have since found a US distributor). It arrived in the office yesterday, so I thought I would provide some first impressions:

Opening the box, the first thing you see is that they don’t bother to finish the manufacturing process. The LCD still has a protective sheet across it and the plastic screen protector that is meant to be fitted (and can be seen in the photos) is in the box with its protective sheets over it still. So, task number one is to get the film off the display, and then, without letting dust get into it, affix the screen protector to the front of the device. Why this could not be done at the factory is beyond me.

Once that is in place, and the two AA batteries supplied are inserted, the device powers up. The screen looks bright and the unit feels reasonably good. The little joystick is perhaps a little cheap, but the remainder looks and feels good. The batteries are at the base of the unit too, so the weight feels right when you’re holding it.

On the software front things are very different though… It boots up OK and presents the shell shown in the photo. It had trouble recognising my SD card (a Kingston card). While I can get it to read music, photos and software from the card, I cannot get it to update the kernel from the card (at least I don’t think it does). The irony here is that the fix for the SD card problems is to update to the new kernel, which is only possible using an SD card. It won’t recognise my older MMC card at all either.

The USB connection is also non-operational. I can get my Windows and MacOS X boxes to see the device, but nothing more. Again, this is supposed to be fixed in the new kernel.

The music player works well (and even has an option to turn off the screen to save batteries which is nice). The sound is not too bad even over the built in speakers either. I have not yet found a movie that the movie player will play (including the one that was on the included CD-ROM, although my Windows box refused to play that AVI as well so I am not surprised).

As for the games, I have not managed to get any to work yet. I did discover that some need an additional library (downloadable from here), but even with that most do not run at all, or die very soon after they start.

If you are looking for a platform you can develop on I would say this one is interesting, but it is a long way from being ready for general consumer use. Sony and Nintendo have very little to fear from this one.

Black Screen of Death

Posted on by
Reply

Was walking around a Target store last week when we came across the demo setup for the new Xbox 360. I’d heard that there were people reporting all kinds of problems from overheating power supplies, overheating units to regular crashing. The Target system seems to be in the latter group; hardly a great ad for the system (and because they had it in a sealed perspex box it couldn’t be reset by anybody without the key).

I also notice that Microsoft has chosen to move away from their famous blue screen of death, which was seen on the original Xbox (most famously, on stage at a trade show when Bill himself was trying to demo something new on it). Black is the new blue it seems, and as luck would have it the abbreviation that most people used for the blue screen, BSOD, still works fine with black as the background 🙂

Apologies for the quality of the photo – I only had my cell phone with me and it doesn’t do so well on indoor shots.

Update: Stopped by the same store last night and once again the unit had this message displayed on it. I did see somebody playing a game on it a little later, but midway through his game it crashed again. This looks like another MS quality product – let’s hope Sony’s offering next year is more stable.

Gizmo from Korea

Posted on by
Reply

At the end of a week in Seoul for a business trip, and I’ve been using my Gizmo Project account to make calls back to the US and the UK from my room at the Grand Intercontinental Hotel. Since I had only the Linux laptop with me though, I could not use the Gizmo Project client (the Linux version was pushed out until next month sometime). Instead, I have been using the X-Lite client from Xten (see my previous post for configuration information).

The call quality has been excellent for every call – at least as good as calling on the regular telephone in the hotel room. We also tried one incoming call (via one of the access numbers) and that worked well too. The price of the all the calls I have made this week using it doesn’t add up to the normal fee the hotel charges just for making a single calling card call, and that’s before the calling card per-minute fees. Of course, I did have to pay US$20 per day for the internet connection in the room, but I was paying that anyway for email and network connectivity.

X-Lite & GizmoProject

Posted on by
4

Looks like I will be heading back over to South Korea in the near future, and this time I would like to keep in touch while I’m there using my GizmoProject account. Unfortunately, the Linux version of the GizmoProject’s client is not here yet (though it is due in August, so I am still hopeful that I’ll have it before I leave), and since it is a business trip I’ll have to take the Thinkpad with me rather than the PowerBook.

Meanwhile, it occurred to me that if it is possible to configure hardware adapters to work with Gizmo, then it should be possible to configure a softphone. I have used a couple of softphones in other circumstances: Kphone for my Asterisk project at Devicescape, and Xten’s X-Lite. The latter is a lot more polished (although getting it to accept a configuration always confuses me), so I thought I’d try that first.

Installation on Linux is simple: just decompress the archive and run the binary 🙂 The screen shot of the SIP settings panel shows my configuration (obviously, replace the first two blurred out numbers in there with your own SIP number – the instructions for setting up a hardware adpater tell you how to find this if you don’t already know it – the Register setting I left at default; it becomes a number once the client registers). The only other change I made was to go into the advanced settings and disable all the codecs except GSM and ILBC since those are the two that the hardware adapter instructions said were supported.

Then I tried an international call from my Linux laptop to the UK, using the Plantronics DSP500 USB headset that I use on the Mac and it worked perfectly. It even shows up in the call history on the Gizmo Project website.

Gizmo Update

Posted on by
2

Gizmo ProjectI have been using the Gizmo Project client on my Mac for several weeks now and mostly I am impressed. I did get a Plantronics DSP500 USB headset which is both comfortable and clear. That made a big difference compared to using just headphones and the built-in microphone (using both built-in microphone and speakers is a bad idea – too much echo for the person on the other end of the line who gets to hear everything they say repeated back on the line).

Mostly, I have been making trans-atlantic calls with it and have found it to be very stable for a beta release. There have been a couple of updates (including one that restored the ability to record calls on the Mac). The only real problem I have had is with their ecommerce backend. It has been down a couple of times now so the client believes that you have no credit and won’t let you make call-out calls (i.e. calls to the PSTN). It also won’t let me buy $20 of credit at the moment. Couple that with the fact that during the beta you can only buy one block of time each week, and it could be annoying, but in fact the $10 lasted over two weeks.

I am also working with VoIP at work at the moment – porting the open source VoIP PBX software Asterisk to run on one of our wireless access points. You can read all about this work on the Devicescape blog, including a mini-review of a Wi-Fi VoIP handset from ZyXEL.

The Gizmo Project

Posted on by
Reply

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or don’t go online much), you’ve probably heard of Skype, but have you heard of the Gizmo Project? If not, check it out. It is very similar to Skype in concept, but it has one big difference: it is standards based.

It is built by the SIPphone.com folks, so when you register you’ll get a SIP telephone number as well as your username. That means that people using other SIP phones, even on other networks in many cases since they peer with each other, can also call you, and vice-versa.

Although the software itself is still in beta, it seems pretty stable on the Mac at least. Since the network underneath it is very stable, the call quality is great. I have made computer-to-computer calls and a transatlantic call from San Francisco to the UK.

So, download it and try it out (you get $0.25 of free credits so you can test call-out calls too). If you do try it, call me (Gizmo name: john94501). I don’t have it on at work yet (the Linux client is still in development), but leave me a message and I’ll call you back 🙂