Larry’s Personal & Tech ramblings

A big source of revenue for brick-and-mortar electronic stores is the rack of cables usually located near the front of the store. It’s certainly convenient to find all of your USB, printer, Firewire, power, HDMI, Audio and other cables at your local store, but the markups on them are enormous. HDMI cables are probably the worst offenders. Here is an excellent example:

Circuit City 4′ HDMI to HDMI cable $39 (Nexxtech 4′ )
BestBuy 6′ HDMI to HDMI cable $59 (Dynex 6′)

The “Monster” brand of these cables cost all the way up to $180.

Now for a dose of reality…Meritline and other online retailers carry the functional equivalent for about 1/10th the price. Here is a 6′ HDMI cable (with free shipping) from Meritline for $7.49:

Meritline HDMI Cable

The only reason to ever buy cables from a local store is absolute desperation.

Update: I’ve been using the Meritline HDMI cables for several weeks now with various devices and they work perfectly.

Here’s a small collection of tips fellow residents of Olympia might find useful:

1) Trouble with the KitchenAid dishwasher - the other day the dishwasher stopped mid-cycle and the blue “clean” LED was blinking. No button press had any effect, nor did unplugging the unit. The LED flashed 7 times repeatedly. I discovered by searching the internet that this means there was an error with the water heating cycle. I reset the machine and now it seems to work correctly. To reset the dishwasher, press Heated Dry, Normal, Heated Dry, Normal without delay between each press and it will go into diagnostic mode. All lights will light up simultaneously. Close the door and it should reset and work normally again.

2) Central Vac supplies -It’s easy to forget that the central vac needs some simple maintenance such as changing the bag and cleaning the filter. I found the best place to buy the bags (Nutone #391 for most of us) is on eBay. Several vendors have them for a few dollars each. A local vendor also sells them, but they cost about twice as much. It’s also convenient to get additional parts such as hoses and vacuum heads. These cost quite a bit, but again I found them on ebay for a reasonable price. I purchased an additional hose (without electricity) and tile floor head for less than half the list price and it’s great for using in the garage.

3) Lighting - The light bulbs supplied by the builder are low quality and waste lots of energy. I’ve found that the typical lifetime of the 65-Watt flood lights is 9 to 12 months. This is compounded by the fact that many of us have high ceilings. A good place I found for replacements is Lowes Costco. They sell 15-Watt compact fluorescent flood lights for $14 a pair $13 a pack of 4.  These lights are brighter than the originals, use about 1/4 the energy, throw off very little heat and last 5-7 years. I also replaced the 50-Watt smaller flood lights with 11-Watt bulbs from Lowes. The only downside to the CFL bulbs is that they take 30-60 seconds to reach full brightness. An alternative is the 50-Watt Halogen lights from Sylvania. They are slightly brighter than the 65-Watt original bulbs and also last 5-7 years.

4) Night Lights - I’ve found it very convenient to have small night lights distributed throughout the hallways. The standard 7-Watt night lights require frequent changing and waste lots of energy. A good product I’ve found is a 1W LED night light with a light sensor from “MaxLite”. The bulbs last 10,000 hours, they’re bright and total energy cost is about 4 cents per month (versus 32 cents for a standard bulb). These are a bit pricey to buy retail (Amazon Link), but I’ve found there are some good suppliers on eBay which average $2.50 or less for each one.

5) Internet - We have 3 choices for internet service within Olympia: dial-up, BellSouth DSL, or Comcast Cable. I work at home and need a fast connection, so Cable is the only real choice for me. The service costs $42.95 per month (taxes included) and gives you 8-16Mbs download and 500-2000Kbs upload speeds. A cable modem costs $25-50 and should definitely be purchased instead of rented ($10 per month). If you are a former AOL dial-up customer and are also paying for DSL or Cable, you can now cancel your AOL payments and retain your email address. Please see my other article about this: AOL is Free.

The internet is incredibly deep and wide when it comes to all types of information. Need to find some software or some computer info? No problem. Need to find competitive prices on a product - easy. Famous people, history, dictionaries, maps, city guides, movie schedules, it’s all there. The only real gap in this huge collection of information is the basic question and answer.

There are tons of discussion forums covering all types of topics. People debate politics, parenting, product reviews, and technical subjects. What is all too common is that someone asks a question; it’s read by plenty of people who could answer it, but it sits unanswered. What incentive do ‘experts’ have to take their precious time to answer ‘newbie’ questions? None! There seem to be two types of people who do answer these questions - those who are kind and try to help their fellow man and those who want to show off their knowledge of a particular subject.

Amazon has tried to correct this situation by creating a system of incentives so that questions get answered. They created a site called AskVille . This site creates a complicated system of levels of expertise and rewards for answering questions. It’s a reasonable attempt, but for me it fails because you earn points which have no clear value. If Amazon would define precisely what you can do with the points (e.g. buy their products) it would go a long way towards making the system viable.

A system of monetary rewards makes much more sense for a software company such as Microsoft. They have a group of employees which “evangelize” new products and operating systems. When things are newly hatched, they give away free tools and offer all sorts of help to get you “hooked” on their new stuff. Once the product has matured, the free tools vanish and it suddenly becomes quite expensive to work with. They maintain several discussion groups to help developers, but the same basic problem remains of answering simple questions. Microsoft is in a good position to use their software products as incentive. MS Office, Vista, Visual Studio all cost hundreds of dollars, but really cost nearly nothing to Microsoft. A reasonable system of incentives to reward experts with free software would probably work well. This could also be used by other software companies such as Nokia to get more developers to flock to their system.

Thoughts?

Each year that passes brings newer and better technology to the computer industry.  Some things get smaller while others get bigger.  Hard drives seem to be the only technology that is simultaneously getting better and worse at the same time.  Each successive generation of hard drives is faster and higher capacity than the previous, but what is suffering is reliability.   The corresponding problem is that as capacities grow, it becomes more and more challenging to backup the huge quantity of data.  How can 1TB of data be backed up by the average user?  I know some computer users who are still using 10-15 year old, low capacity hard drives on a daily basis; they just work the way they’re supposed to.  I’ve had 3 modern hard drives fail on me in the last few months.  This trend must reverse; as more and more people rely on their computers to organize their lives, we can’t tolerate catastrophic loss of our data.  It’s not fair to put the burden of constant data backup and yearly hardware replacement on the average user.  RAID configurations are just a band-aid over the problem.  I’ve had to invest money in a mirrored arrangement of drives with an external controller box.  Hard drive manufacturers (listen up Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi): I would pay more for a 120GB drive which will last for 10 years than a 500GB drive while is guaranteed to break in 1 year.

“Micro_View” is a product I created several years ago for a client.  It’s a simple imaging library for Win32 and WinCE which allows you to load BMP, GIF and JPEG images into a HBITMAP or it can display them in a window.  The code is fast and small (the Win32 lib file is 96K).  I created a stand-alone command-line driven executable which displays an image in a borderless window and a link library which has 3 functions defined:

int APIENTRY MicroView(TCHAR *filename, int iOptions);
int APIENTRY MVLoadBitmap(TCHAR *filename, HBITMAP *, HPALETTE *);
int APIENTRY MVLoadResource(HINSTANCE hInst, TCHAR *rname, HBITMAP *pBitmap, HPALETTE *pPalette);

If you need to add simple image handling to your application, it doesn’t get much easier than this.  This is something that’s been collecting dust on my harddrive for quite a while, but would probably make a pretty good retail product.  I will see if I can package this up into a reasonably priced product in the next few days.  Please email me (bitbank@pobox.com) if you’re in need of such a library.

I’ve been happily using my Motorola SB4100 cable modem for several years.  It never entered my mind that cable modems, like all technology, slowly advances.  Comcast bought my local provider (Adelphia) and said that my internet surfing would go faster because of “Power Boost”.  I never saw any evidence of this until my cable repair guy mentioned that I should upgrade my modem.  On my SB4100 I was getting 6-8Mbs download and 384Kbs up.  I purchased a Motorola SB5101 (which isn’t exactly new) and retested.  The new modem gets up to 16Mbs down and 1.5Mbs up.  The “Power Boost” effect is apparently that the Comcast connection buffers the first megabyte or so of data to speed up “smaller” files.  Large downloads or uploads settle back to a more reasonable 6-8Mbps down and 500Kbs up.

A while ago AOL decided to charge separately for their dial-up service and allow free email accounts. This news doesn’t seem to have reached all AOL customers because I’m still finding people that are paying for AOL dial-up access thinking that it’s necessary to keep their email address. I understand their need to keep an AOL email address because they have business cards or advertisements printed with that address and can’t easily change it. The other night I asked a neighbor of mine if he was still paying AOL to keep his email address. He’s the third person I asked and the third person who is paying without the need. Our neighborhood has a contract with the cable company to get discounted cable TV, so most of us also have high speed cable internet service. If you’re paying AOL $15-$22 per month and paying for DSL or Cable internet, you can probably save yourself some money. Here’s AOL’s description of their free email accounts:

AOL Free email help page

If you’re feeling grateful that I just saved you $180 per year, feel free to send some of it to me

Let me start by saying that I’m not a big fan of Apple. Through the years I have always felt that they extracted a few too many dollars from their customers and left them with a few too few options. I’m glad Apple released the iPhone because it will stir up the mobile market a little and inject a few new ideas into the mix. The truth is that the iPhone is very much a 1.0 release - missing several important features and designed to be more of an improved iPod than a good phone.

1) As a music player it falls short of being usable; 8GB of memory is not enough to store even a fraction of most people’s music collections.

2) As a phone, using a touchscreen is a mistake. A phone shouldn’t require 2 hands to operate nor require your eyes to be focused on it to make a simple call. Get ready for iPhone-related car accidents.

3) Choosing AT&T was a big mistake if you’re touting your device as a great wireless web browser. EDGE network speeds can be OK, but they’re never great.

4) Most of today’s expensive smartphones come with a much more reasonable price tag when you’re roped into a high priced data plan for a minimum of 2 years. For the rate plans that the iPhone offers, it should be free with the 2-year contract.

5) Apple fanboys will drink the kool-aid as always and flaunt their wondertoy.

Even though HTC won’t admit they released the “Touch” as a response to the iPhone, I think we can see through the smoke. The Touch is a nice little Pocket PC, but it has the same issues as the iPhone; in other words, I would never carry one around as my main phone.

For me, the HTC S710 (Vox) is the epitome of SmartPhone design. It’s small, light, tough (no touchscreen) and has a convenient slide out keyboard. This is the phone I’ve been waiting for since Microsoft released the “SmartPhone” platform.

Let the flaming begin…

I have always typed better on the old “clicky” IBM/Lexmark keyboards. There is probably some combination of tactile and auditory feedback that helps me type my fastest. I bought a bunch of broken ones from a liquidator around 1993 and managed to put several complete, working ones together. I’ve tried to keep them functioning and moving them forward with me as I’ve upgraded my work computer (and luckily it still has a PS/2 port). Along the way I’ve always wondered how long they would last (the switches and the controller). Well, last week I got a partial answer. My computer booted up with the dreaded “keyboard error” message. I figured that the cable had worked its way loose, but that wasn’t the case. Apparently the controller board had died. It’s not worth spending the time to determine if it was the 6805 or some discrete component. Impressive is not quite a strong enough word to describe its service record. In today’s disposable society, it’s simply astounding that a piece of consumer electronic equipment could work continuously for 8-16 hours a day for 14 years. Luckily I had a spare controller board and brought it back to life for a few more years

I’ve had a vested interest in Windows Mobile devices since the very beginning because of my many years of Desktop Windows programming experience. It’s definitely a big advantage for Microsoft to allow developers to leverage their programming experience from the desktop onto mobile devices. Microsoft’s design philosophy seems to have been to bring as much of the desktop operating system as possible onto battery powered devices and put a new face on it which fits the PDA/Phone paradigm. The obvious advantage to this is being able to port code easily between the desktop and mobile devices. What I’ve been discovering more lately is that the one fatal flaw in this design is a non-issue for many (like me) and a deal breaker for others.

The problem I’m talking about is application and memory management on Windows Mobile. The current scheme allows the users to run as many simultaneous applications as they like. This is usually a good thing and allows mobile devices to multi-task just like the desktop version of Windows. The bad thing is that Microsoft discourages the “close button” and “exit option” from mobile applications. Instead they claim that the system will close applications automatically when resources get low. This is the fatal flaw.

Let’s suppose that your application is about to run on a phone that’s got a bunch of other applications running. Memory is running low, but there’s enough memory to run the EXE, but not enough to allocate space for the work that the app wants to do. The application is allowed to run and then gets a failing error code when it tries to allocate memory. The automatic memory management doesn’t appear to kick in because the app did succeed in getting loaded. The application tells the user that there’s not enough memory to do the work, so the user must go through many manual steps to shut down other programs to free up some memory.

This scenario probably occurs frequently with certain users of Windows Mobile products. Those users who run various software applications and don’t shut down their phones at the end of each day. As the days pass and they run different programs, the phone gets more and more cluttered with running programs and will get slower and more problematic as resources are used up. A friend of mine clued me into this situation recently and it dawned on me that this is probably a big issue for many users. My experience with Windows Mobile devices is that the operating system and applications work excellently and I am thoroughly satisfied with my phone/pda devices (I shut them down every day). I could see how many people would criticize Windows running on phones for the reason stated above. What’s the solution? My first idea would be to encourage application developers to include a real “Close” and “Exit” option on their mobile applications. The second idea would be to educate people to shut down their devices at the end of each day when they set them to charge. I don’t think there can really be any good automatic process inside of Windows which fixes this situation. Perhaps a sentinel application which pops up when resources are getting low and gives the user the choice of shutting down some applications. Anyone have an idea?