I missed my bus this morning. I arrived at the bus stop at 7:18, according to my Nokia E65. It wasn’t due to leave for another 2 minutes, and the bus was neither parked and waiting or driving off in the distance.

There happened to be a Go Wellington bus, with GPS-driven clocks, stopped in front of me when my phone showed 7:20. I was 3 minutes and change behind that clock – the first time I have noticed any significant deviation. What annoys me about this is that I use Nokia’s phone management software and it refuses to keep the time on the phone updated properly. Gammu manages to do it, so why can’t Nokia figure it out?

My computer at home is about 5 years old now. It’s served me quite, and continues to do so, but a few niggles are starting to get on my nerves. I’m a bit limited by the small-form-factor case which provides very little expandability, but I’d also rather not just dump the machine outright. It’s got spark left in it yet.

• There is an intermittent source of distortion on audio from the on-board AC97 codecs. I haven’t spent too much time trying to isolate this. It doesn’t matter which output port I take (front or back panel) and I’ve cleared the mixer/amplifier section. I’m starting to consider an external audio device. Given that I lack PCI expansion slots, this one would have to ride on Firewire or USB. Nothing has been decided here.

• The on-board video adapter is a bit less than capable. Something changed about a year ago, which I’ve never fully gotten to the bottom of, causing some videos to refuse to resize. Watching a DVD where the image is barely larger than my hand is painful. I’d also like a bit more viewable real estate. 1280×1024 is a bit scant. I’ve got an 8x AGP slot that I can work with and it looks like I’ll be best served with an ATI device. I’m weighing my options and favouring the Radeon HD3850 or HD3650.

• To go with a new video card, a new monitor is appropriate, especially with prices having come down. Given the amount of photography stuff that I’ve been playing with lately, it makes at least a bit of sense to have a monitor that doesn’t suck. I haven’t been able to apply a colour profile to my current monitor, but I know that it’s nowhere near as bright as it was in past years. Jumping from a 17 inch screen to a 24 inch might be a dangerous jump, but I think I’m willing to take that risk.

That’ll probably be it for now. If I replace anything else, I may be better off buying a new machine after all. Can I even get Socket 478 CPUs anymore?

I have noticed a few memory errors occurring while serving up this blog. It seems to have started when the host server was rebuilt following a disk failure. I’ve run a few usability tests and I don’t know that it has any visible effect; I am not getting half entries of text or images or anything. I’ll have to take a bit of time to look into it – something is obviously wrong – but it may take a while to track down.

The server hosting the content you’re reading is currently suffering from an existence failure. Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

This is obvious, but I ran into it head first last night. After listening to half an hour of the CBC Radio 3 podcast on an already-low battery, my poor phone beeped once and sat lifelessly in my hand. Luckily, I had already confirmed my plans to meet up with a friend after work, so there was no real danger in not crossing paths and not being able to contact each other. Forethought wins… this time.

Aside from that, there is one other problem that I’ve noticed. I don’t always catch an incoming text message when I’m listening to music. The beep blends in remarkably with electronic music. Calendar alarms are a little more aggressive, resulting the media player pausing for the alarm; I presume that an incoming phone call would do the same.

I don’t know when the problem first started, but for several months, I’ve been unable to resize a video on my home computer. I never really took the time to figure out why until tonight. The culprit is the sis driver for xorg. It was defaulting to the blitter method for Xv, leaving my videos fixed size. The solution was to add this line to xorg.conf:

Option “XvDefaultAdaptor” “Overlay”

And just like that, full screen is actually full screen and not a big black bounding box around a small video.

I gave a brief seminar today at work discussing board-level serial protocols, specifically I²C(Inter-Integrated Circuit) and SPI. It was largely a comparative look at high-level implementation of circuits using the two standards, followed by a brief look at interfacing SPI devices to the Analog Devices 21369 DSP SPI Controller.

The talk went well enough, but it’s the side conversations that might become dangerous. Speaking with a couple of my co-workers, I’m seeing a chance to turn a neat idea into a funded project. But if it doesn’t get funded, it might become a slightly expensive personal project. It’s possible that I may try to get a Blackfin sent home¹.

¹ This doesn’t mean that I’ve given up my search for a DSP development tool-chain that runs under linux.

I sat down to watch a movie with a friend the other night and a forgotten problem reared its ugly head again. I was attempting to play a Region 4 DVD in a laptop that was born in Region 1. Since the laptop is running WinXP¹, I was warned and prompted to change the region setting for the DVD drive. I reluctantly agreed, not wanting to futz with computer stuff while my friend was waiting for the movie to start.

New Zealand has held a stance on protecting consumers from region coding. However, many computer-component DVD drives have region coding built in. Since my DVD collection includes both Region 1 & 4 discs, switching back and forth is a very short-lived solution, and given that switching is recorded in hardware, undoing it is very difficult.

My options are largely based around software DVD decoders that don’t involve checking/setting the region. This is normally not a discussion, since the linux-based movie players do software decoding. Herein lies the final hurdle: for some reason that I have yet to discover, all of the movie players that I’ve tried have recently stopped being able to resize video to full-screen. I haven’t had the time to investigate this enough to come to a solution, which is why I was playing the DVD on the laptop in the first place, but it’s really starting to annoy me. I will need to solve this one properly if I’m going to be able to live without a TV/DVD player in the house.

¹ This is the second time since purchased in 2002. The reason is that Analog Devices does not have a tool-chain for DSP development that runs under linux.

After watching my typo-averages skyrocket over a couple months of having a broken LDC, I have finally gotten a new phone. Although I was given a recommendation¹ for a Vodafone 715, I ended up going with a Nokia E65. It’s a used phone, picked up from TradeMe.

I’ve only had about half a day of use out of it, and so far, it seems like a pretty damn good phone. I’ll have to watch my battery usage to see what sort of condition it is in, but there doesn’t seem to be any usability defects. I’ve been able to exploit a few of the nice features, like wireless access, but I have a lot of configuration yet to do (pick up email, prefer data to not come over over-priced GPRS, get some music on there).

There are downsides to buying a used phone. There is no warranty, there may be defects, and you may get more than you asked for. In this case, 44 images, 3 videos and a bunch of email in an authenticated IMAP email connection. I like to think that I’m one of the good guys, though. Everything was deleted as I found it. I have no need to exploit someone who didn’t clean up properly after himself. Besides, he included a 2GB memory card and adapter. I certainly won’t complain about that. I will have to get a set of headphones that work with the Nokia data port. I could use bluetooth, but why drain the battery faster than necessary?

I’ll probably write more about this phone after I get used to it and learn more about it. I’m pretty happy off the start; I hope that continues.

¹ The 715 is a very capable phone. I’d recommend it as it was recommended to me, especially for the price. However, I was taken by the wireless smart-phone capability of the E65.

Apple’s new toy is set for release in a few days. I won’t be getting one. Why? Because Vodafone’s data plans are crap.

I realise that Vodafone is subsidising the cost of the phone, but those data plans are horrible no matter what you think the phone is worth. Given that Vodafone offers data plans for non-iphone users, it might be better to buy a phone off-plan. The Broadband Everyday plan, comparably 1GB/month, is only $59.95/month. Over two years, that would cost $1438.80. Add an 8GB iphone for $979 or a 16GB model for $1129 and you’re sorted. No need to waste the extra $4500.

Actually, I think it’s more than about price for me. I think the phone is overly hyped. More gadget than I want or need. I’m more interested in what’s about to happen in the used-phone market.