Horse - 50/365

Horse - 50/365, originally uploaded by morberg.

So I made 50 days of my 365 project so far. Here's hoping I'll go the distance. Nothing special about this picture other than the number...

Dinner

Dinner, originally uploaded by morberg.

I've decided to try a 365 photo project - taking one image each day. When I joined flickr and looked at my archives in calendar view I noticed I was quite active when I got my first digital camera, but after a while the images were further apart.

Having a project like this will hopefully make me pick up the camera every day even if nobody has a birthday. Should be a good way to learn more about my new Nikon D90 as well.

If you're interested you can either follow the RSS feed for my 365 project directly or drop by my photostream now and then (also available as RSS of course). Good images might end up here as well.

Shining - the other version

Brilliant alternative trailer for The Shining:

When to get a Nikon D90?

There are currently lots of rumors floating around about an upcoming digital SLR from Nikon, the D90. The camera will most likely have:

• 12 MP resolution on a DX sensor
• Active D-Lighting
• Live View
• 3" LCD
• 4,5 fps burst mode
• 1080i and/or 1080p video recording
• HDMI and GPS port

I want one. But when should I get it? I looked at historical price data for Nikon cameras and kits sold in Sweden (data from prisjakt.nu) and ended up with the following chart:



There is quite good correlation between different models (possibly excluding the D300) and the price drop, so a curve like this can probably be assumed for the D90 as well.

The introductory price for the D90 will probably be $1,000 and $1,300 with a 18-105 VR lens. I'm guessing this will translate to 10.000 SEK and 13.000 SEK. Now you only need to decide how much you want to pay and how long you are willing to wait.

I'm leaning towards getting the kit when the price drops to 10kSEK and I'm guessing this will happen around May 2009.

Streaming music to an AirPort Express

I have a SqueezeBox 3 in my living room that I'm really pleased with. But when the time came to add another set of connected speakers I decided to go with an AirPort Express (APE) instead and then stream to this from my MacBook.

The main reason for this was Apple's Remote application for the iPod Touch. With this I can control music playback from my iPod. The two drawbacks are that I can't listen to music locally on the MacBook while streaming to the speakers and I can't sync music between the APE and SqueezeBox. Since the APE was the cheapest alternative (900 SEK compared to 1.400 SEK for a headless SqueezeBox receiver or 2.000 SEK for the SqueezeBox 3) I went with that.

The APE can also function as a wireless router so I went to work and reinstalled my local network, putting my Netgear router out to pasture. Unfortunately the 802.11G performance was worse than with my old router. This was apparent when running VNC to my HTPC where I had to enable the lowest quality setting. Not a big problem, but a nuisance nonetheless.

Then I started to stream music to the APE. Thirty seconds went by and then the sound dropped out for a couple of seconds. Then it came back on. And dropped off again. Now it is a big problem. The SqueezeBox has a nice big buffer and decodes MP3 locally, the APE works by decoding the audio on the computer and then streaming uncompressed audio over the network. Combine this with a small buffer in the APE and you get a problem when you add other network traffic.

Other people had reported issues and if I shut down network intensive applications I could get streaming to work properly. A solution, but not very satisfying.

I then started thinking (I probably should have started with this before redoing my network). The APE can also use 802.11n - which is in the 5GHz spectrum. Why not use that? I went and got the Netgear and set up two networks; one 802.11g and one 802.11n. But now I couldn't access my MacBook (running 11n) from my Touch (running 11g) which was the main point of getting the APE to begin with.

More thinking and then I put the APE in bridge mode. Problem solved. I now use 11n for the MacBook and APE and 11g and Netgear for the rest of the network (HTPC, Touch, Wii, SqueezeBox, Kid's computer).

Wordle is kinda neat

I just found out about Wordle through Thomas Hawk's blog. Of course tag clouds is nothing new, but wordle does it with style and you can pour any kind of text content into it. The image shows my tag cloud at del.icio.us.

I've pretty much stopped using del.icio.us by the way. I'm now using Foxmarks for synching bookmarks between computers and that has been working out fine for me so far.

Switching sound device with your remote

Welcome to more autohotkey (AHK) goodness. Building on my previous post about switching audio streams with your remote we now add switching the default audio device.

You could use any remote button you want for this, I used the hash key (#) which I don't use for anything else. I assume you already have AHK setup properly and a script for your remote. Before we continue we need to install two things for AHK:

1. COM standard library
2. Vista Audio/Volume Control Functions
   

Download both packages and extract them in the folder "My Documents\AutoHotkey\Lib\" (create it if you don't have it already).

Now you need to modify your remote script and add the following code:

;---------------------------------------------------------------------------
; When pressing #:
; Close Media Center, change default audio device and restart Media Center
;---------------------------------------------------------------------------

#IfWinActive ahk_class eHome Render Window
#::
; Close application with Alt-F4
Send !{F4}

; Change default audio
COM_Init()
device := VA_GetDevice()
device_name := VA_GetDeviceName(device)
COM_Release(device)
COM_Term()

Run, mmsys.cpl

WinWait, Ljud ahk_class #32770

if InStr(device_name, "HDMI-enhet")
ControlSend, SysListView321, {Down 2} ; second device
else
ControlSend, SysListView321, {Down 4} ; fourth device

ControlClick, Button2, Ljud ahk_class #32770 ; set default
ControlClick, Button4, Ljud ahk_class #32770 ; OK

; It might happen that clicking 'OK' doesn't work
IfWinExist, Ljud ahk_class #32770
{
WinClose, Ljud ahk_class #32770 ; close window
}

; Start Windows Media Center
Run, C:\Windows\ehome\ehshell.exe, , max

Return
#IfWinActive

Note that you need to replace all occurences of "Ljud" with your local translation of "Sound" (i.e. the name of the windows with sound properties). You might need to change the path to your ehshell as well. Restart the script and presto, you can now switch the default audio device with your remote too.

Main source of information: Lexikos work as detailed in select sound source thread on AHK forums.

New graphics driver installed on the HTPC

With the stubborness of a donkey I went and installed updated graphics driver for my HTPC. I've tried this before without much success. Why update then? I figured SP1 for Vista is probably not too shabby, and that installation can be blocked if you have old drivers.

Windows update suggested drivers for my 82G965 Graphics and Memory Controller Hub (GMCH) from April 2008, so I went with those. Installed. Rebooted. No sound over HDMI.

But at Intel's page I found version 7.15.10.1472 from May 28 which were somewhat newer (Intel's page incorrectly says that the version number for these drivers are 7.14.10.1472). So the donkey went to work and downloaded that instead. Install. Reboot. Success!

I'm as surprised as you are.

Switching audio streams and subtitles with the MS remote

For some reason it is not possible to switch audio streams or subtitles in Vista Media Center with your remote. You can use the keyboard combinations Ctrl+Shift+A for Audio and Ctrl+U (for sUbtitles?), but I don't want to drag out my keyboard when watching a movie. Not to mention it's difficult for the rest of the family to remember the correct key combination (Ctrl+A activates the radio by the way, so you need to remember to press that Shift key too...).

But there is light at the end of the tunnel. It's called Autohotkey (AHK for short) and it allows you to trigger actions based on keypresses. And you have a couple of unused buttons on your MS remote control anyway (the colored ones at the bottom). It is not for the faint of heart, but it is possible. And here's how to do it:

1. Download the latest version of Autohotkey and install it
2. Download Micha's Human Interface Device support for AHK here
3. Unpack Micha's rar file in a new directory of your choice
   
4. Run the vcredist_x86.exe to install necessary DLL:s (I forgot this first and couldn't grok the error messages I got)
5. Download my remote control script and save it in the same directory. Name it e.g. MyRemote.ahk (or whatever you want - it needs to end with .ahk though)
6. Create a shortcut to the MyRemote.ahk script in your Autostart folder (optional, but nice)

You should now be able to use the red button to switch audio tracks and the green button to switch subtitles!

But if you're out of luck you might run into problems. E.g. your remote might send different codes. In that case you need to find out the remote control codes your remote sends. Uncomment the line MsgBox Received code: %Vals% in the script to find out your specific codes and change the values in your script correspondingly.

Sources of information and credit to:

• Micha for the work on HID device support
• boulder2 at The Green Button for posting info in this thread(script does not work as is, though)
• yotz for improving readability of Micha's original remote control script
  
• TRHR for showing that you need to have {Enter} after ^+a
• Look here if you want to hide the taskbar icon for AHK
  
• And finally this thread on the Autohotkey forums on Micha's work
  

Getting a better keyboard for my HTPC for free

The keyboard and built in keypad that comes with the Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo EV 2535 is less than optimal. It misses characters and it's difficult to navigate the mouse pointer precisely. (You kinda think this would be a standard feature on a wireless keyboard.) After having read Johannes's recommendations (post in Swedish) I wanted to buy a better keyboard+mouse combination.

But why? I have several alternative input devices laying around already (iPod touch and two laptops). Why not remote control the computer with those instead?

Reading up on different solutions VNC seems the way to go. It's open and cross-platform and you can get clients for OS X, Windows, and even iPod touch. But the server doesn't seem to work on Vista. Then I found TouchPad Pro, which seems like an excellent application for the touch and their installation instructions did mention Vista.

So I installed it. And it did work.

All that remained was to get a good VNC client for the Macbook and here Jolly's Fast VNC fit the bill. Now I can remote control my HTPC from my laptop and I don't have to rely on the finicky keyboard that came with the HTPC. Instead I use the excellent MacBook keyboard and trackpad. I think I need to configure the keyboard layout since accented characters are not where you expect them.

To sum it up: don't believe everything you read on the web. You can use TightVNC in Vista.

Next step will probably be to get the TouchPad pro application once it hits the AppStore (I haven't bothered to jailbreak my 2.0 iPod Touch) and use the iPod as a remote.

Twitter is addictive

As it turns out Twitter is quite nice. It also removes the need/urge to post to this blog. Do follow me on twitter for more frequent updates on what's going on.

Oh, my FriendFeed might be of even more interest since it in addition to tweets also will include other activities. On my part it will probably mostly be shared Google Reader items and Flickr activity.

This blog will not be updated nearly as often.

Testing Twitter

As you can see on the right, I've added a twitter box. I've been reading a lot about the service during the past year or so in the blogosphere, but haven't tried it out myself. But when I read the post "Twitter is like sex" I decided to give it a go.

Many say twitter is the new facebook (which I tried, but didn't use for long), but I'm not convinced. We'll see.

Replacement of Guitar Hero III disks in Europe

Activision, you've got to be kidding me. The process for getting a replacement disk for Guitar Hero III is atrociously bad. The Aussies got a different deal, and in the US you got a pre-paid envelope. Here in Europe?

• You register your shipping address on a web page
• Wait for an email (with a sender you can't reply to)
  
• Go to another web page as stated in just received email
  
• Print out a label to put on an envelope (you have a printer, don't you?)
  
• Get a bubble envelope and put your disc in (because you probably have nothing better to do than go shopping for an envelope)
  
• Send it off to Activision
  
• Wait (unclear for how long) with no possibility to play Guitar Hero in the meantime
• Get a replacement disk shipped to you

You would think Activision would have improved the replacement process after having tried it in both US and Australia, but this one seems like the worst yet.

All companies make mistakes, but good companies handle them in a good way and turn the customer support experience into something positive.

This is not a positive experience.

Update: Activision's complete response to my request for an improved process:

Hi,

Unfortunately there is no alternative if you would like the remastered disc.

Got MacBook?

As I mentioned a while back I was getting a MacBook. I've had it for a while now, and I'm loving it. There's still bugs in OS X of course (exhibit A and B), but it feels much more solid and polished than XP and Vista. And even though the MacBook is the entry laptop made of plastic the build still feels solid. I got the middle version and upgraded to a 250G HD, which made it identical to the black MacBook but 800 SEK ($140) cheaper.

After a couple of days I had most of the system in place. This is most of the software I've installed that I felt lacking from the beginning:

• Transmission, a bittorrent client
  
• Mactex, a LaTeX distribution
• Aquamacs, an editor (I also tried Carbon Emacs, but Aquamacs felt better integrated)
  
• NeoOffice, an office suite (the OpenOffice OS X version is really terrible, don't bother trying it)
• iSquint, a video converter to convert video to mp4
• Firefox 3 beta 5, a web browser. Safari is actually quite nice and speedy too, but lacks the plugin support that Firefox has. I'm currently mostly addicted to Piclens (not yet available for Safari 3.1) and Foxmarks for synching bookmarks between computers.
• SqueezeCenter, a music server for my SqueezeBox. Also added the lazy search plugin which is truly excellent.
• Skype, a chat program
• VLC, a media player
  

After having transfered all my music and images to the MacBook that was pretty much it. I've been using iPhoto quite a lot of the software that came with the computer. I tested the Aperture trial download, but decided it was not for me. I don't want to mess around that much with my images.

I've remapped Caps Lock to Cmd and F5 to Spaces and added two finger tap for right-click, but left most other settings unchanged. Oh, I put the touchpad acceleration at max as well.

The two finger scroll (in both directions) is beautiful and I find myself doing that on my work PC laptop as well. What I'm still getting to grips with is the different keyboard shortcuts. Using e.g. cmd+Backspace for delete, Fn+right arrow for page down and Fn+down arrow for end of page takes some getting used to. Finding the backslash (Alt+Shift+7) and other not so common characters we're also tricky and not the same as on a PC. But I'm getting there.

All in all I'm very pleased with the MacBook and OS X. Highly recommended.

Getting mininova RSS feeds and uTorrent to play nice

uTorrent has an excellent built in RSS feed parser, but it does not work properly with mininova's RSS feeds (which only supplies URL:s to the torrent's web pages and not the torrents themselves) without some sort of kludge. RSSatellite has been quite popular, but then you either need to find someone who has set it up for sharing or install a local web server.

Enter direct option. You simply pass it on to a mininova RSS URL, just as any other URL option by tacking on "&direct" (without quotes) after the original URL. It is described on mininova's blog, but that post doesn't show up when searching on Google for solutions to this problem. I'm doubting this will either, but at least I have a placeholder for future reference for myself.

Nice

Facade, originally uploaded by morberg.

Went to Nice this past weekend and it was really nice. Check out flickr for more images I took in Nice.

Nothing on but reruns

Windows update decided that the graphics driver on my HTPC needed updating. It probably did. However, as I've mentioned before that driver is bundled with the HDMI sound driver. Which meant that sound over HDMI stopped working. Again. Way to go, Vista!

First I was pussled and tried switching HDMI ports on the TV. Of course that didn't work and then I remembered I've had a similar problem before. So I went to Fujitsu Siemens support page, but the sound driver there wasn't possible to install. Yay, Fujitsu!

Then I headed over to Intel's driver page and tried updating to the latest driver (which Vista probably already graciously installed for me), but that didn't do any good. As expected. Perhaps I could reinstall the old driver? I probably could, but Intel didn't have any old drivers listed on their web page. (Fujitsu actually have old drivers, so perhaps that could be an option next time.) Hurray Intel!

Luckily I had saved the driver I downloaded in October, which I could use and now I have sound working again over HDMI. It only took five reboots and an hour and a half of my time. No West Wing tonight.

Now I've turned off automatic updates in Vista. The next time something stops working I'll probably start from the bottom and update the BIOS and then all drivers one by one. Here's hoping it doesn't have to come to that.

Did I mention I ordered a MacBook this past weekend? From now on I will throw as little money as possible Microsoft's way. Go me!

Go TED

I've been watching the TED podcasts on my iPod touch and they alone are worth the price of admission. To get an idea of what they can offer take a look at Isabel Allende's talk. It's brilliant, as much of the other TED talks. Don't miss them. Even if you don't look at them on an iPod touch.

Problem with external USB drive and ripped DVDs in Vista

Oh, did you think that it was that easy to get your DVD collection in Vista Media Center? Think again. After having ripped all the kids' movies on my desktop computer (its much easier to have a proper keyboard and mouse - compared to the HTPC keyboard that often misses characters when I type) I plugged my external USB drive to the HTPC.

I couldn't quite remember how to add a new folder to the DVD directory in Vista MCE, but soon found the proper instructions (its not Settings/DVD, but rather DVD library/[Info button on remote]/Add movies). All the movies were then shown in Vista MCE with their corrects covers. I had placed folder.jpg files in all directories with the corresponding cover art. Beautiful.

But when I tried to show the kids how to play a movie, I got an error message saying that the file format wasn't supported. Strange. I tried playing the .ifo-file in media player classic (not a MS-product). Worked like a charm.

My daughter said that this was far too many steps for her to remember.

Tried Media Center again. No dice. Restarted Media Center. Nothing. Then I tried Media Player 11 (MS) and I couldn't open the file. This time I got an error message saying that the DVD had the wrong region. Strange. I didn't know that files on my HD had a region code.

Since I already had some DVD folders on my C: drive I copied one to my external USB drive after which I no longer could play the movie. Interesting. Now I copied another movie from my external USB drive to my C: drive and voila! The movie played as it should through both Media Player 11 and Media Center. Great. Isn't DRM the best?*

Does this mean my shining new external drive is useless?

One option would be to encode all my DVD folders into Divx or something. At least I wouldn't have any problems with regional codes. But then my kids can't use the shiny DVD library interface in MCE to play movies. Which was one of the main drivers for this project to begin with.

Enter Google. I found a couple of interesting pieces of information, many relating to issues with permissions, how deep the folders where nested and spaces in folder names. I tried everything and nothing worked. During the process also noticed that if you have tried to open a file in Media Player 11 and then move that folder with Windows Explorer you get an error saying you don't have proper permissions. You do. You just need to quit Media Player before moving the folder.

Anyway, after some more searching I finally found this particular comment from jmtasu on Matt Goyer's blog:

well looks like it’s a bug in Vista, it can’t read DVD’s off of USB Hard Drives… If you mount the drive into a folder, it overlooks this and you no longer get the error.

More searching revealed the exact steps to mount the external drive as a folder and, to borrow Steve Jobs's catch phrase, Boom! Everything is up and running and it is beautiful. Permissions, folder nestedness or spaces do not matter.

That's two hours of my life I never get back. Seriously considering a Mac for my next computer.

But now, at last, all the kids' movies are available through the DVD library in Vista MCE. I'll add my own movies when needed.

*Regional coding is not DRM per se, but its in the same ballpark. I doubt a free operating system would have the problems described in this post.

Time to stop using DVD:s

Since I already have my music on a computer using CD:s pretty much only as a way to purchase DRM free digital music and for backup purposes I've been thinking about doing the same for video. When we couldn't watch a DVD the other day because of a faulty disc I decided that it was time to take the plunge.

The price and sizes of hard disks have been somewhat prohibitive before, but now a 500G Seagate FreeAgent USB drive was only 950 SEK (~150 USD). I can store about 100 DVD:s for a cost of 10 SEK per DVD. The only thing that's left now is the tedious process of ripping all a selection of my DVD:s.

I'm using the free DVDFab HD decrypter to rip the entire DVD, and then DVD Shrink to remove all unnecessary stuff (extra material, foreign language tracks, FBI warnings, etc.). In the end I have a ripped copy that is instantaneously available, without annoying ads and warnings. As an added bonus I don't need AnyDVD to slow down my DVD drive in order to keep it quiet.

An introduced inconvenience is that the first time I want to watch a movie I first need to rip it and wait 30 minutes for the process to finish before I can watch it. But for me its definitely worth it.

On a side note I got a 250 GB MyBook exactly a year ago for 50 SEK more, proving Kryder right.

Streaming music to the iPod touch, part 2

As I just told you I was looking at different solutions for streaming music to the iPod touch. Now I've tried out webot and simplifymedia and unfortunately none meets my requirements. Webot felt slow and sluggish, and I don't like that you stream via a server on the internet. Simplify's UI was utter crap - you were only shown an alphatebized list of your songs, which is totally useless when you have a large library.

What now? I'm still hoping that slimserver will be the method in the future, but for now I've installed apache on my machine to serve up my music. I had some problems with my local firewall, but once I got around that everything is working smoothly. I will probably try to add Apache::MP3 later to get a better way of navigating my files (demo), but I have my music collection in pretty good order so just navigating the directory structure is good enough.

I haven't bothered to make a separate post about the latest Apple announcments, mostly because I was underwhelmed by the Macbook Air, unimpressed with Apple TV 2.0, and irritated about paying $20 for a couple of iPod touch applications that you get for free if you buy the touch now.

Streaming music to the iPod touch

I'm still looking for a way to stream music to my iPod touch. The contenders are:

• SimplifyMedia (found through touchtip)
• weBot (which I found through jkOnTheRun)
• orb
• DOT.TUNES
• SlimServer - if bug 6266 is fixed (feel free to vote if you have an account) - found at Oliver Bruchez's blog

My main choice would be slimserver since I already have that up and running on my computer for the SqueezeBox. I've tried orb and was not impressed - it was very resource heavy and slowed my machine down to a crawl. Besides the stupid name, DOT.TUNES is not free.

Which leaves SimplifyMedia and weBot. From what I've read SimplifyMedia might be the way to go, but I'll have to try it out first. I got some orb vibes (i.e. slow and heavy web application) from the weBot screenshots and it seems to transcode music to an 128k stream, but it might be a good service. There's just something about having to sign in to a web site to access my music locally (my main use case is to access my music library on my computer from my iPod touch when I'm at home) that irks me.

I'll let you know if I find a solution I'm happy with.

iPod touch and SqueezeBox

As promised here is an update on using iPeng for controlling the SqueezeBox: its excellent! It was kind of iffy to scroll on some pages (you needed to use two fingers) and I couldn't find search functionality but other than that it was great. Apparently iPeng 0.2 has added search support so things are looking even better (haven't tried it yet but will soon).

If you have a Squeezebox and an iPod touch/iPhone its a must. There's no reason to wait, go ahead and install it now.