Larry’s Personal & Tech ramblings

This release fixes problems with the display code on the Desktop PC version as well as saves/restores the volume level on the Windows Mobile version. On the Desktop PC version there were various problems with scaling the window to maximized and running maximized. All window display issues should now be resolved. A user had informed me that the volume level on his Samsung Blackjack was being reset by running SmarGear, so this change should correct that issue.

Get the latest version here: SmartGear

I’ve been sidetracked many times while trying to finish the latest version of Virtual CE. I’ve finally released the new version which now supports all Windows Mobile devices. For those of you unfamiliar with this product, it creates a real-time display of your WM device on your Desktop PC. It’s basically VNC in reverse. Here are some screen shots of it in action:

I’ve reduced the price to $10 and simplified the feature list to make it easier to use. Please give it a try:

Virtual CE

I was told by a customer that my game emulators did not display correctly on the Motorola Q9H smartphone.  I got hold of a loaner device and discovered the problem.  For some reason, the video memory is mapped in an odd way (reminiscent of the old Apple II).  This odd RAM mapping means that many games/multimedia applications will not run correctly on the Q9H.  I’ve written a workaround for my software, but the bigger question is how many devices/programs this affects.  My best guess is that this is the fault of the new TI OMAP 2420 CPU.  This chip has many 2D/3D capabilities, so it makes sense that the designers didn’t care much about how the video memory was mapped since most software would use the advanced capabilities of the chip and not write to VRAM directly.  I’m in contact with my friend at TI and will report more information about this problem as soon as I know.

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.

It’s taken a lot longer than expected to release the latest version of my image viewer. Many other projects have gotten in the way, but I’ve finally wrapped up version 4 of PQV. The sales pages on Handango and PocketGear are not quite working yet, but the PayPal link works. The $14.99 license is per user, not device. A single license allows you to use the viewer on all your Windows Mobile devices and Windows Desktop. Here’s the new product page:

PQV 4.0

When you install the Pocket PC or SmartPhone versions, the Desktop PC version also gets installed.

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.