Mike Dent’s ‘ickle Home (thing)…

I’ve not written much about my home mythtv system recently, it’s been running pretty well for a while now. It’s not taken over from the trusty Tivo yet but that’s partly my problem I guess. I’ve not configured the remote control to work in an intuitive way with Myth just yet, so to get the best out of it you still need to use the keyboard, obviously this is not practical from several feet away, yes I could get a wireless one I hear you cry but ever time I think about doing this I realise I should get to it and fix the remote config.

Anyway, the reason for this post was to let you know I have upgraded the Myth box from Ubuntu 6.10 to Ubuntu 7.10 which has taken MythTV from 0.20.2 version to 0.21. That does not look like a significant jump but it does bring loads of fixes and some big new features, the main one is ‘multirec’. This allows you to record several digital channels with one tuner card, as long as these channels are on the same multiplex you are good to go. Of course your Myth box has to have enough horse power to handle this to. So, at the moment I’ve configured mine to record 4 channels at once and will see how it goes. Watch this space

Or a review & comparison of the Blackberry 8700g, TyTN II (Windows Mobile) and Blackberry Curve 8320

Yes, you’ve asked for it and now you’ve finally got it, one of those techie type posts about a mobile phone or to be more precise three mobile phones, (or cellphones if you are reading this from the other side of the Atlantic).

Regular readers will have noticed that I like my Blackberry, it has served me well for the last 18 months of my contract with T-Mobile. It’s used daily for checking my calendar, reading emails and the occasional bit of web browsing. Its a Blackberry 8700g and by todays standards looks a bit on the retro side, however drop it and it would probably bounce right back up in to your hand with barely a scratch on its tough casing. It’s been super reliable for me and I think it’s locked up once in all that time when I had to remove the battery to get it working again.

However it lacks one thing, no make that two things, a camera and Wi-Fi. So at the end of my contract period with T-Mobile I was offered a free upgrade. T-Mobile do not do a Blackberry with Wi-Fi and a camera, also known as the Curve 8320 but they did do a rather snazzy Windows Mobile device called an MDA Vario III, this is also known as a HTC TyTN II (yet another snappy name!)

This phone seemed to have everything, even 3G (read fast Internet, video calling) and a built in GPS. I read some reviews on it and it came out well, very well indeed. So I called the good folks at T-Mobile and they said if I stayed with them for another 18 months they would send me this phone for free, well actually “£5.49 postage Sir”! How could I refuse. A couple of days later and this little beauty arrived at the door!

It weighs about 3 times as much as my Blackberry 8700g and packs so much in to a small device, even a fairly large keyboard which slides out and tilts! I was in geek heaven

It didn’t last long though, as soon as the initial WOW factor had worn off I realised the battery would only last just over 1 day with fairly conservative usage. The next annoyance is the power on button, its almost like the designers went out of their way to make a button so unobtrusive, so hard to press accidentally that they in fact made it near impossible to turn the phone on. I guess I’d just got used to taking my Blackberry out of its case and it automatically switching on as it brushed past the magnet in the case.

Ok but putting that aside it’s got a camera, so that ought to be good? In theory yes but this camera is like nothing else you have used. Firstly the delay from pressing the button to the shutter taking the photo is probably between 2 and 3 seconds, I kid you not. Next the actual image you see on the screen is so blurred by motion the subject you are photographing has to be absolutely stationary, stationary as in a building or tree with no wind. I’m not exaggerating here, the camera is next to useless, sorry but it is.

On to 3G, well here is something that seems to work, I don’t have 3G coverage at home (something I was disappointed to find out when I got the phone - c’mon T-Mobile, lets have some better coverage 0.5 miles south of Lancaster city centre, please) but I did try it out from several locations, web browsing seemed fairly snappy, apart from Pocket IE, which is a story in itself, 3G video calling worked fine.
I’m sorry but the annoyances go on, the next big one is the actual interface itself, in this case its called Windows Mobile 6 Professional. I’m sure you’ve seen the nice screenshots in the advertisements whilst reading the Telegraph or staring at the opposite wall of one of London’s underground tube stations (just think instead of reading that book on the tube you could be putting the finishing touches to an important proposal or tidying up a spreadsheet for this mornings meeting!?), indeed it does look pretty and very much like Windows itself of course but thats where the appeal for me ended.

It’s just so damn ‘clunky’ and cumbersome in everyday use. Simple things like looking up a contact in the address book and dialing it are no longer a one handed experience as they are on the Blackberry. You either have to get the stylus out and start prodding around on the screen, risk doing it with your finger nail and easily mis pressing something or try to navigate around the interface with the scroll wheel and keys. You could pop out the hidden keyboard but this is certainly a two handed operation.

Then there are the occasional freezes and frequent slow downs of the device. It comes with all the quirks of a windows PC but with a phone bolted on too. Suffice to say it didn’t take me long to start looking on Ebay to see how much I might be able to get for it and to find something to replace it!

I’d decided I needed something with a full qwerty keyboard that is not hidden or needs sliding out. It must have a camera, Wi-Fi and be able to syncronise over the air with my Exchange 2003 server.

Enter the Blackberry Curve 8320, this was a similar form factor to my 8700g but included Wi-Fi and a camera, no 3G but that’s no great loss. Unfortunately T-Mobile in the UK do not sell this model, the only provider that does is Orange. I wasn’t about to switch to them as I’d just signed for another 18 months with T-Mobile.

I contacted RIM to see if they sell unlocked devices, “NO” was the answer. Back to Ebay then and I found somebody in the UK selling the Blackberry 8320 locked to Orange. A little investigation and I found I could get this unlocked, so I placed my order and received the phone.

I’ve been using it now for about 2 weeks since I got it unlocked and it’s superb! The built in camera seems to take good pictures and its so much more responsive than the TyTN. The Blackberry interface is very responsive and in my opinion is laid out in a much more logical fashion. I’ve not had any lockups or slowdowns on it either. The only criticism I have is that the radio receiver for the cellular network does not seem as sensitive as the one in the 8700g.

It works fine with my Exchange 2003 server and Blackberry Enterprise Server (free express edition), I’m able to book appointments on my calendar when at a customers and have everything synced without messing with any cables or bluetooth. It has voice dialing - no extra program required as with the Windows Mobile device and so far has been rock solid reliable.

Its a slightly smaller device than the Blackberry 8700g, fits nicer in the palm and the styling is much more recent!
If you have got a Blackberry and are in the UK and need it unlocking, use the contact form, I may be able to help.

Firstly appologies for the late post! I intended to post this the day after we did this wardrive but time slipped by and I never got round to it.
The last wardrive I did (or wireless network survey if you want the ‘posh’ name) was back in November 2006, I aim to do one every 6 months but missed out on the May 2007 one and decided to just to it 1 year later. So here are the juicy stats and pictures.

October 2005 Encrypted 52% Total detected 357
May 2006 Encrypted 61% Total detected 752
November 2006 Encrypted 70% Total detected 1041
November 2007 Encrypted 85% Total detected 1690

Most popular channel: 1 then 11 then 6.

Most popular SSID: BTHomeHub with 413
Second most popular SSID: Sky with 189

Most unusual SSID’s: ‘Cheeky_your_Stealing_My_Internet’ & ‘gogetbrianpotter’
 

 Here is the plot of the entire route. It’s the same route I do every time, probably about 7 miles round trip, through the centre of Lancaster, on to Morecambe not forgetting to take in a small part of picturesque Heysham and back home via Torrisholme Road.

As you can see the entire route is covered in access points.

Here is a close up of the Lancaster section. The loop you see at the centre of the image is the A6, it’s actually a one way road through Lancaster in a clockwise direction.

 Here is the Morecambe and small part of Heysham section of the route. Not much to report here apart from the almost constant coverage of wireless devices.

A couple of  things which do stand out is the increase each year of the number of secure networks. Also BT are contributing a large amount to the number of networks, with them now ‘owning’ almost 25% of the detected networks, this has risen from last years figure of 16% (combined from BTHomeHub and BTVOYAGER ssid’s Nov 2006).

Of course its not true though, apparently it’s a bug in the EIT guide data which is sent with the digital TV signal. Some how it  sends bogus data which confuses MythTV and makes it think it has far more guide data than it should have. Normally EIT data in the UK has the coming 8 days guide information.

There is an easy fix, connect to your backend mysql and ‘connect mythconverg;’ this should display something like:-

mysql> connect mythconverg;
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Connection id:    679
Current database: mythconverg
Next issue the command:-

delete from program where starttime > date_add(curdate(),interval 14 day);

And it’s done. Make the interval greater than the amount of TV guide data you know you *should* have, I could have probably got away with 9 days here. Anyway, all looks good now.

Quick one this I promise. Just what is it with Web 2.0? I mean where did Web 1.0 or 1.9.9 end and Web 2.0 begin?
At least to me it does not make sense. How can you put a version number on this? Have a read of this interview with Mr WWW, Tim Berners-Lee, about 2/3rds down. If anybody should know…..

ROAAAR, GROOOWWWL, meow? Well whatever noise Leopards make, Apple have now released their long awaited update to Tiger, OSX. The current version is 10.5, apparently it was delayed in order to give Apple and the right honourable Mr Jobs time to get the iPhone well and truly out of the Cupertino door. Anyway the point of this post was to tell you I have upgraded my iMac from 10.4.9 to the all new and shiny
10.5, Leopard!

The upgrade pretty much went without a hitch, performance seems very similar to Tiger for me, I’m running a 1.83GHz (yes the 0.03 makes a difference!) Intel Core Duo iMac, with 2GB under the hood. One oddity which kind of inspired me to post this update to my blog was the behaviour of Finder, OSX’s version of ‘My Computer’, for those on the ‘other side’.
I’ll try and explain. Assuming you already have a Finder window open somewhere, lets say it is buried beneath other windows on your desktop, with Tiger - OSX 10.4, all you had to do was one click on the Finder icon in the dock and it would magically appear on top of all your other windows. Well with Leopard, one click on the Finder icon and all that seems to happen is the Finder toolbar, across the top of the screen becomes in focus. A further click is needed to bring the most recent Finder window to the surface?
I’m assuming this is intentional, or perhaps it is some odd bug with my system? I have not rebooted since the install, I’ll sign off and do just that now, expect an update if anything changes!

I just had to put fingers to keyboard to bring this to you. If you are with AOL and thinking of going to a wireless setup, please do yourself a favour and avoid a Belkin wireless router like the plague!
Today I had the misfortune of wasting more than an hour trying to convince a Belkin F5D 7632-4 wireless router to connect itself to an existing AOL broadband connection.
Although the ADSL sync light came on, the CHAP/PPP login light remained red, looking in the router logs revealed a “CHAP Authentication failure”.
Of course my first thought was that the existing AOL login and password was incorrect, however connecting the BT USB modem back to the PC I was able to login fine with the details which refused to work with the router.
I should point out at this stage I normally create a new login/username, or ‘Screen name’ in AOL speak for the router to establish its connection to AOL. However due to some very strange problems with the PC and AOL software I could not get to the AOL page to create the new screen name, so I decided to use an existing but un-usued screen name.
No amount of trying, checking and double checking would allow me to get past the CHAP failure.
In despair I decided to call the Belkin support line. Syed of Belkin advised me to call AOL and get the password changed and all would work. Despite me telling him I could login fine with the screen name and password as it was now with the AOL software. He remained adamant that this would fix it.
So thats what I did, and do you know what - he was right! Amazing but true.

Hey, long time no see huh!? Well as usual I have been busy with ’stuff’ and just not got round to updating this. I am amazed at some blogs I see which are updated *at least* once a day, how do the owners get time?
Anyway for a change I am typing this entry using my Blackberry, on a slow train back to Lancaster from London. The subject that got me to post this was about mobile access to the internet, websites, email and all that - OR - rather the lack of it!
Of all the places we need access to our ‘online lives’ the train is surely one of the biggest. We are forbidden to use our mobile phones on aircraft so that’s an easy one, it’s obviously not safe to type an email whilst driving, but on the train that’s where it is so easy and a great place to catch up on emails, check some websites etc. Yet it’s not easy to keep a gprs data connection for any length of time on a train, at least not for me!
I’m sure it’s being worked on (I’m not talking about wi-fi here, I realise some train companies offer that now) its just a matter of time before we have our very own mobile pico cells on the old fashioned choo choo train. So lonf for now…..

For a couple of years I’ve been running a small CCTV system at home with a couple of cameras connected to it. It had not been too
reliable and for some reason the Linux box running it kept crashing.
A few weeks ago I decided to reinstall the old version of Linux with a recent version of Ubuntu and left this on test. Everything was running
fine and the crashing problem had stopped. Last week I saw some CCTV cameras on offer and decided to get 3 new ones. I got a high
resolution dome one for the front door way and 2 mid resolution ones for the back of the house and side of the house. All have IR led’s
fitted which gives them fairly good night vision too.
They are all connected to the Ubuntu linux box running the latest version of Zoneminder, a free CCTV system which requires a PC, capture
card and camera to make your own security system. You can also use IP cameras and wireless camera too if you wish.
The system records motion and stores it on the computer hard disk. You can then play this back whenever you want. It is also
possible to access this system from anywhere in the world with the correct login details. So far I am extremely pleased with the results.
Here you can see a sample image of the ‘montage’ view in Zoneminder.

Technorati Tags: cctv, zoneminder

Not much to report, those two or three people who have visited my weblog in the past might recall that it looked
slightly different to this? no? well never mind…..
I changed the theme this evening. It’s far too easy to do things like this in Wordpress, and as I don’t get much time to
‘tinker’ with things these days, I thought I’d make the most of the 10 minutes or so I had in front of my iMac this evening
and give the ‘blog a new look. So there you have it.
Oh, one more thing, I got a new camera recently, Canon G7, I like it.

Well, sorry I have not posted anything here recently. I’ve been pretty busy with one thing or another since before Christmas. I’ve started a ‘Twitter‘, have a look at http://twitter.com/mcdent if you are not sure what it’s all about. Kind of like a mini blog which people use to let other people know what they are up to. You can add friends to your twitter list so you get notified when they update their twitters, confused? So am I. Sadly the twitter system & network seems to run on a 486 class PC with a 2mb network connection, it’s early days for them but I think they need to upgrade the server to a Pentium class PC at least - Yes it’s sometimes a little slow…. I can’t help but think it’s just one more thing to forget to keep up to date though.

I’ve been busy upgrading my Request Tracker, RT, system which I use for keeping track of Ubertechs faults and jobs, I just need to get the email side sorted out then we are all done. I’m still running on the old 3.4.x version but I’ve been able to transfer the database over to the new 3.6.x system and all seems fine. The new box is a compact mini-itx, Via Nemiah system with a 2.5″ drive, seen here on my flickr pages. This will replace the existing P3 900Mhz box.

I’ve also been doing a little more work on my long overdue MythTV system. Mainly concerned with the aerial and TV signal. The box has a pair of digital tuner cards in so we can record up to two channels at once, record one and watch another etc. However the location we live in is not the best for radio reception or transmission. Being a radio amateur that is not good, however finding a house which the SO likes and is on top of a mountain is not easy. So I need to make the best of a bad job as far as TV reception is concerned. Up until now we have made do with satellite TV from Sky fed in to the Tivo system, however with the MythTV box I plan to have two digital terrestrial signals and feed the Sky signal in via composite video too. Anyway when we first moved in to the house I put up a fairly large TV aerial and installed a mast-head pre-amplifier to boost the signal, analogue at that time. As the mast-head amplifier was a narrow band one I decided to take the mast down, remove it and install a wide band amplifier in the loft. The signal level has improved however I am now suffering from some strange interference in the evenings, this affects the analogue signal and the digital signals. I talked to the neighbours this evening and they have had exactly the same symptoms for about 2 months! So some serious investigation is called for me thinks.

Other jobs on the backburner are an upgrade to my Zoneminder security system, upgrading my Asterisk box and getting round to installing my gigabit switch in the house - oh and then an upgrade to the main file server in the garage of course, the list goes on….

Technorati Tags: MythTV, Sky, Tivo, ubertechs

We have had a Tivo personal video recorder here in the Dent household for a few years now, in fact we got it not long
before Sky introduced their own Sky+ system in the UK and stopped distributing the Tivo boxes. It has served us well and continues to do so but I often wonder what we will do when it finally curls up its capacitors, packs in and goes to Tivo heaven.

What’s so good about Tivo I hear you say?…..

Once you have told the Tivo what you wish to record, each week, shows which have your favorite actor in, shows which contain a keyword etc it will merrily continue recording these programmes until you tell it to stop. You can then watch the TV which you want to watch when you want to watch it, - better be careful here, I’m starting to sound like a PVR marketing guy.

Anyway its a very useful piece of equipment! I considered moving to Sky+ on occasions but Sky seem to consistently sneak up their subscription charges, I’d rather not be tied in to one system anyway.
This is where MythTV comes in! I attempted to build a test Myth system 18 months ago but as often is the case I ran out of time and didn’t have a decent TV capture card at that time anyway.

So it’s about time I knuckled down and had a go at building an all new MythTV system!. I’ve even gone as far as giving this soon to be MythTV box it’s very own page on my blog, see link above. So check back again for further progress on this sure to be exciting project, just the thing for these dark and damp winter evenings in the UK.

Technorati Tags: MythTV, Sky, Tivo

No fireworks for Morgan and I this bonfire night, oh no, we had much more serious business to attend to! 6 months have passed since
our last wardrive so it was time to blow the dust off the wardriving kit and do our usual drive through Lancaster to Morecambe and back via Torrisholme. We travelled the same route we did in May and October 2005.

I was very surprised to arrive back home having covered 16 miles in about 40 minutes to find we had collected no less that 1041 wireless devices, thats 65 for each mile travelled. Every time the computer picks up one of these devices it makes a beeping sound, at times the beeps were almost continuous! Crossing Greyhound Bridge in Lancaster, which is only about 400 meters, we picked up 52 access points. Many of these were probably sited in the apartments along the quay side.
I have uploaded some of the maps I have created from the drive to my flickr site .

Now for the statistics, after all, that’s what it’s about :-

October 2005 Encrypted 52% Total detected 357
May 2006 Encrypted 61% Total detected 752
November 2006 Encrypted 70% Total detected 1041
Most popular channel with 30% was channel 11
Most popular SSID with 11% was BTHomeHub with BTVOYAGER close behind at 9%
Most unusual SSID’s “Moon Base Alpha” , “Lovely Dougal” , WhatYouLookinAt and Ziggyland

So there we go. I was really surprised we topped the 1000 mark. I hope to do some more wardrives in the coming months covering some more built up residential areas. But for now, that’s all folks.

Technorati Tags: netstumbler, lancaster, wardriving, wifi

We had a spare pumpkin left over recently from the halloween ‘festivities’. I decided to carve an Apple symbol out of it and make my own iPumpkin