Samsung Captivate - My iPhone Replacement

My AT+T family plan phone upgrade eligibility seems to waffle (even on the one iphone). One day they are all eligible, the next none are. This waffling even happens within the same day - stupid. It's a full five months before our "2 years" is up but some consistency would be nice. I won't even bother to tell you what the ATT person said, it just doesn't make any sense. What has happened, though, is I have been able to order my iphone replacement and my daughter ordered a new iphone (3GS, not 4, she needs to actually use the phone, not just look at it).


Over that past week I learned that ATT now has one of (if not the) best Android phones available - the Samsung Captivate (generically aka Galaxy S). It has a great screen, FAST processor, and lots of cool stuff you can do with it/add to it. Like Apple phones, these phones have some features (like FM radio) defeated on ATT. 


An iPhone 4 will beat a Captivate in certain specs and performance - especially (for now) web page loading. That will change when the next Android OS (2.2) comes out for this phone, which will be very soon.The iPhone 4 takes better pictures. There also is no  front facing camera (will we actually use these eventually? - it may just be disabled) or (almost useless) led "flash." The stuff it does do though is impressive, like great Office integration, easily replaceable $5 battery, cheap add-ons, Adobe Flash, etc. It is the best phone for gaming. Period. Too bad I don't do much of that.

It's $149 at Amazon for a family plan upgrade, $199 at ATT store.

And check out the do-dads, cases, etc.

Windows phones will be out soon. They will have better cameras and eventually a better OS (really, I am confident that WP7 is going to be a much more complete and robust OS than any previous mobile OS). But I had to jump on this - I am impatient and sick of my iPhone.

Android

I find it exciting to see a robust community of Android users. I don't think there is anything I will miss from the iphone world, application-wise. Some of my most favorite apps on the iPhone include Radar Scope (I found something just like it for Android), Stanza (ditto), Uverse (I don't think so, but it has to be coming) and Nano Studio (will be hard to beat except for the pathetic CPU of my 3G). Everything else is there (all those crappy apps, Android has them too). 

ATT has their Android phones somewhat locked down (I just can't have that) but this is easily circumvented with Android Sideload Wonder Machine or very straightforward rooting. Tethering is easily available once rooted. All interesting and useful stuff. I plays flacs but I haven't figured out if I will be able to play flacs 24 bit flacs (I have my doubts). UPDATE: The samsung/att media player plays 24 bit 48 kHz flacs, but not higher. The stock android player does 16 bit flacs only, from what I can tell. Sounds great.

I was sick of Apple, iTunes, and the shape of the iPhone 4, and I don't want a Edsel-phone. Now I can leave that all behind me!

Is That All You Got?

As a hi-fi enthusiast I am a magnet for good gear - it somehow finds me. My latest acquisition is an interesting little amplifier, a Carver M-1.5t, picked up for so little money it was a crime. This amp was an existing Carver design, tweaked to emulate a Mark Levinson ML-2. Knowing that Carver was very concerned about making practical amps that could be used where you would use tube amps like the ML-2, I figured I had a great test bed for it. This turned out to be very true.

My best speakers (and I don't even know how many great sets of speakers I have, but these are my best) are Acoustat Model 3 electrostatic panels. I've had these for a number of years. When I first got them, I tried every amp I had, starting with the biggest. All failed miserably, with solid state amps going into clipping without producing much volume (most popping like mad). I finally settled on a set of two Peavey Classic 120/120 rack mount amps (making 240/240!). These babies have 8 6L6 tubes in each amp. The 8 big tubes could not make an Acoustat get really loud, but they were loud enough to sound sweet and I have lots of other stuff to reinforce the sound.

Carver says the M-1.5t produces 600 watts in each channel when the max headroom light comes on (up to 750  watts into one channel). This max indicator was lit within the first 30 seconds of my test. My tests are incomplete, and all were done completely by ear, but this is what I heard:

• More volume than the two Peavey 120/120's - not a lot, but more
• Slightly less distortion than the Peavey's (that's not good - the Peaveys distort a lot when driven hard - the Carver seems to distort quite audibly as well)
• The Carver definitely sounded like a transistor amp compared to the Peavey (duh - 20 output transistors vs. 16 output tubes) 

This last point will take some better testing to see if it is really true. It seemed like a very simple bright versus warm, classic tube argument, but I need to level the field and use more similar sources. I definitely like the idea of getting more volume out of my flagship speakers and I am so proud of how they took 1200 watts from the Carver and seemed to say, "Is that all you got?" This testing is tough work but somebody's got to do it.

I Dodged the iPhone 4 Bullet ...

... and now I think I am cured of iPhone desire for good. To think I nearly bought one on blind faith, but I was saved when I decided to wait for a white one.

After actually handling one, I decided there isn't anything compelling about it. Besides the much publicized issues of non-functional antenna design, weak blue tooth support and a flaky proximity sensor, I have these issues:

• Boxy, uncomfortable shape - despite being smaller, it doesn't feel smaller (inversely, though, despite being heavier than my 3G, it feels lighter)
• The display is good, but not so good I have to have it. Over-hyped.
• Bogus multitasking - this is no way to operate a computer. How stupid. 
• Still not the strongest camera.

There are lots of things that are still issues like the lack of removable media, lousy bluetooth functionality, and being tied to the Apple ecosystem. Were it not for jailbreaking, the whole iPhone experience would be more like an iPod toy than a hand held pocket computer (which is what I really wanted in the first place). The jailbreaking community is the best thing about iPhones, and from what I've seen, there isn't much of a parallel in the Android world. When the Windows 7 phone OS comes out, I think it should quickly eclipse the Android user community (wishful thinking). 

All this has led me to be happy with what I have for the next few months and see if something better comes along. The iPhone 4 now looks like it would have been a mistake. In the mean time, I bought a little 2.2 pound net book to play with. I know a lot of techies have tried and abandoned the net book genre, but I'll give it a try anyway. My consolation toy. Thanks to jailbreaking I will be able to tether it to my iPhone with MyWi (not that I ever really need to).

I Think I'll Settle for an iPhone 4 and a Cheaper Data Plan ...

... in fact, I am thinking about getting THREE iPhone 4's next week (don't tell my kids). I'm thinking in public here.

The new AT&T data plans
When I decided I wanted a phone that could do more than a feature phone (mostly I wanted to access Internet resources), the cheapskate in me (with two kids in college at the time) REALLY didn't want a $30/month data plan. I love the freedom the unlimited data plan provided - do whatever you want. Stream audio, video (the biggest two consumers). Upload, download (what?). Tether the connection to your PC via wi-fi or bluetooth. No wait, AT&T and Apple won't let you do that. But I didn't like the high cost.

So here you had an unlimited connection, but in reality, the vast majority of users never used even 200 MB per month (the new limit for the half price, $15 plan). Streamed audio works pretty good - I sometime listen to Internet radio or Wolfgang's Vault while driving - but it sounds like satellite radio - compressed and crappy. Streamed video is barely practical over 3G - even AT&T's faster variety. You generally aren't going to be moving very large files around with an iPhone, so in order to get your data use up you will have to move lots of them.

And tethering, well, the jailbreak app MyWi works exceptionally well, giving you wi-fi or bluetooth (or USB) tethering, but how much do most people need to use something like this? It's sort of a last resort, when you are in a cheap hotel with no wi-fi, for instance. The phone gets really hot with all the radios going full blast and you better have a power source.

I have never used 200 MB of  AT&T cell phone data in a month. I've come close but never gone over. I will take the rate reduction and lose my unlimited data plan forever (forever is a long time).

iPhone 4

Then along come AT&T and Apple allowing us to upgrade now instead of the previously posted October date for all the phones in my family plan (5). I always want to upgrade phones ASAP. The subsidies make them relatively cheap. You can resell phones on eBay. So an early upgrade is almost a no brainer.

Now lets see, though. I have to choose an Apple smartphone for this early upgrade - no Android, Blackberry, Windows, Palm, etc. Realistically, there isn't another phone that can do what this phone does any better or with more style. The UI is outstanding and the devices are extremely well made.

The other thing that has made me happy in the Apple camp are the many "others" (in Lost-speak) - a huge community of techies and hackers to keep Apple's "Dharma Initiative" (more Lost-speak) in check. iOS4 jailbreaks will be available.

I guess I can settle for a half price data plan and a new, much improved (over my 3G) iPhone. I'll be ordering phones next week!

Post Script: the manager I spoke with at the AT&T store (who was assuring me that, yes, once you lose your unlimited plan, it is gone, but you can switch any time between the remaining plans) told me the AT&T Uverse iPhone app will eventually have video streaming from your DVR. That would be nice - like a Slingbox without the box.

The iPhone and the Large Law Firm

Warning - this post contains some of my thoughts about iPhone use at a large law firm from my perspective of an iPhone user who works in a law firm IT department. I have no practical experience with any level of iPhone integration in a large law firm.

Unfortunately, when one talks about things that law firms are commonly doing, it frequently doesn't include the largest firms. What works for most law firms may not work for one of the biggest. Yet there are some things that are common to most decent-sized firms. In large law firm IT departments, iPhones are very common, though probably not as prevalent as the officially supported (and subsidized) Blackberry. I know there has been some work by vendors to provide the necessary hooks to do some cool things with iPhones in large enterprises. It was encouraging to see this http://www.apple.com/iphone/business/profiles/sonnenschein-nath-rosenthal/, especially since it included SharePoint integration.

To me it seems like Apple's http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/Enterprise_Deployment_Guide.pdf misses the mark. I'm not sure how all large enterprises work, but I think most of them have no interest in providing the kind of support this manual suggests. I think they would prefer to carefully allow access to things like email, SharePoint or a Citrix Desktop from employee owned phones rather than owning and babysitting the entire operation. Coordinating phones from different carriers all over the world is much better pushed back to the individual (at least organizationally).

Various strata of integration could strengthen iPhone support in larger, more secure enterprises. Of course it starts with email, Lotus Notes integration being of interest to me. Sybase iAnywhere, IBM's iNotes, Notes Pro and maybe a couple other apps provide Notes email to iPhones. Mail should always work fine in this form factor, you just need to make the necessary security hops. There are a few others vendors that do some Notes database replication as well, but I don't see that as a strong draw since Notes has been dying as an application platform. Secure access to SharePoint servers providing mobile-optimized web pages could be useful, and fairly easy to establish. Attending meetings through a mobile device is a natural. A Citrix desktop might also be OK, but have you ever tried operating a desktop on a little touch screen? It's not a very useful capability.

Having a resourceful, always connected computer in my pocket has been great, and I don't expect to ever again be without such service. Integrating this level of mobile functionality into large enterprise will take some time and effort and I look forward to it.

Stanza Ebook Reader for iPhone With Calibre

In my post about Kindle and the Kindle iPhone app I was a little off due to my new found enthusiasm for ebook reading. I've been having a good time reading several books on my tiny screen - it really works - using Kindle for the iPhone. My only apprehension is that the iPhone screen will not be good enough to use while basking in the tropical sun when I go to Cancun in May. But I picked the wrong application. The Kindle solution I proposed requires a jailbroken phone, which not everyone has, and there is a much better alternative: Stanza for the iPhone and Calibre on your computer.

At first blush, Stanza has many features Kindle does not, and I'm not sure if anything from Kindle is missing on Stanza. But Kindle does have a nice feel and good speed. Some operations on Stanza can be slower (especially on my 3G, the most brain dead iThing still sold) and the feel is different. But after a little digging, and working with the very good Calibre application and Stanza on the phone, I have concluded that this is a far better solution. There is nothing to prevent you from using both, but Stanza is the way to go.

Using them is simple - no instructions necessary - just get Stanza from the app store and Calibre here: http://calibre-ebook.com/download. Both are free.

Using the Kindle iPhone App for Reading Non-Kindle Ebooks

Please see my update - I found something that works much better and does not require a jailbroken phone, which using a back door to the iPhone file system does. Read: http://bobklass.blogspot.com/2010/03/stanza-ebook-reader-for-iphone-with.html


I've tried reading PDF's off the iphone, but I really wanted to read big ebooks. It was very much hit or miss, mostly miss. The PDF could be too big or too small and would not reformat appropriately. Not useable.

The answer - Amazon Kindle. The Kindle itself is a great device, but one whose days are numbered (unfortunately - I think they are a great idea). The Kindle iPhone app is free. Kindle books are expensive, but there is usually a free download of the first few chapters which gives you a good idea of both the books' contents and the reading experience on the hand held. The XML-ish text reformats based on the size font you want. The PRC file format seems to mostly be XML and some binary compression standards. Bookmarks are kept. It all works nicely. And Kindle isn't a horrible deal right now - $259 for the device and free global wireless data access (for now). 

PDF's, TXT or DOC files can all be turned into Kindle PRC files with a free app called MobiPocket Creator. Home made PRC's can be a little idiocyncratic, but they aren't bad. You sftp into your device (OpenSSH from Cydia and Winscp) and drop these files into your hand held (find the folder by searching for *.prc with Winscp). I am reading multiple books this way right now, and the Kindle app keeps my place nicely. Highly recommended.

Asus O!Play HDP-R1

Sometimes I feel like I am a little slow adopting some technologies. Of course this isn't really true. There are just some I don't like. MP3's, for instance. They don't sound very hi-fi, like most digital TV (and it's all digital now, isn't it). I didn't get a DVR right away, but we've had one since we got Uverse (maybe a year ago) and we love it. I am almost always bleeding edge on Microsoft products. I convinced myself, I'm not a Luddite.

I like my video hi-fi too. The Uverse DVR is reasonably good (like the Uverse service), and I have a Blu-ray player, and that stuff looks and sounds great. I have a lot of video content (most of it high definition) on the 3TB of internal disc in my Windows 7 machine. I had been sneaker- netting it to my Blu-ray sometimes (or watching on the 25" LCD monitor) but I got the idea that a media player would be way better. This is also better than trying to attach a PC to my living room HDTV (I tried this in 2005 when I got it and it didn't work well - I needed better stuff).

Shopping for media players, I found there are a bunch. A few are expensive. A couple don't have a network connection (that won't do). I stumbled on the Asus O!Play HDP-R1 and gave it a long look due to the great price and the Asus name. When you are building a computer, Asus is always a brand you should consider - their stuff is first rate. This product is VERY new.

I don't know much about what is in the box. It's small, and consumes very little power. The Oplay is running some flavor of Linux.

The Asus forums had lots of posts from dissatisfied customers, but reading between the lines, I thought I would be able to make it work just fine and that it would do exactly what I needed - play just about any video or audio file, connect to my network, host ESATA, etc. It does all it was supposed to do, and well. This post on the Asus forum has the secret to getting it working with Windows 7.

If you buy one, it will probably come with firmware version 1.07N on it and the network will not work right for Windows 7 machines (other computers will be OK). Set up a Windows 7 user "OPlayer" with password "OPlayer" and give it permissions on shares that hold your media. Reset the Oplay to factory defaults, load firmware version 1.13N, and the network connection will work perfectly (UPnP will work too).

So I have another cool gadget! It is a highly recommended toy!

Another Use for AVCHD - Hi-Fi

If you are coming into this cold, you might first read my other two posts about AVCHD.

Some audiophiles recently started burning AVCHD discs instead of using DVD-Audio or the LPCM capabilities of DVD-Video.

DVD-Audio and PCM on DVD Video both allow some pretty high quality audio. With DVD-Audio, you get two channels of 24 bit 192khz or 6 channels (5.1) of 24 bit 92khz and lossless compression. PCM on DVD video also goes to 24 bit 96khz, but they take a lot more space and I am not sure if anyone did much with multi-channel PCM on DVD-Video for this reason.

Lots of people have been using those formats for original recordings, vinyl rips and such, but now we have some AVCHD's starting to show up. This is somewhat lost on me because of equipment limitations. My Blu-ray player is in my living room home theater which has Pioneer/Bose audio which is very much inferior to what I use for hi-fi listening in my studio. So far I haven't gotten my studio PC to play these either (although I thought it might be able to with the right software). This will probably lead me to getting a Blu-ray for the studio.

I am exploring tools for authoring this content: http://www.videohelp.com/tools/sections/authoring-bd-hd-dvd. This may be a good way to go for the future. It's nice to have so many options, but I just recently authored my first DVD-Audio (of a nifty vinyl rip I made myself of The Three Sounds "Soul Symphony"). Now on to the next format!

Lastly, I will share some somewhat related links that are cool. The first is some analysis of various formats including vinyl, and the second is a look at DVD-A vs. SACD.

http://users.bigpond.net.au/christie/comparo/part4.html

http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/sacd-dvd-a/

9-9-9 Beatles Remastered - Criticism - They Got it Wrong

Today the long awaited remastered Beatles CD's were released. The new versions are not an improvement on the versions released in the 80's, unless you were looking for compressed dynamics and some tweaks in the bass equalization. Like many CD's being released today these days, the new Beatles releases were made to sound louder - they are less dynamic so they don't sound quieter than other recordings.

This of course is not a good thing. The one thing CD's can do well is dynamic range, but lately many CD's are all about being loud. Ultimately this will help kill the CD market and further deaden peoples senses, so they can be happy with horrible compressed audio (MP3, etc.). As far as the bass, I think I could have tweaked in a little bottom if I thought it was missing. I do not understand the whole mono thing (the new releases are available in both stereo and mono). These recordings for the most part were originally stereo, so what's with mono? I want more channels, not less.

My listening tests compared the new CD's with the old ones as well as with vinyl and some oddball Beatles releases like a 20 bit HDCD of Let it Be (Naked) and the Love DVD-Audio (remixed by Sir George Martin and son). As you may know, I am quite the audio snob, with some serious listening gear (electrostatic speakers, tube amps, etc.). I am also a long time Beatles fan - I have purchased pretty much the whole cycle at least two or three times.

So I would be lying if I said I didn't want these new CD's to sound great and jump out of my speakers like the Stones and Kinks and many other old rock groups' high resolution remixes. The regular 16 bit CD's can sound very good too. I wanted these to be good. But they don't offer any improvement for me. In fact, although I may change my mind after more listening, for now I prefer the old CD releases over these new ones.

I did not do any empirical analysis of the new versions of any of the tracks (maybe I could suck them into Sound Forge and measure the dynamic range - for now I used my ears). I also have a strong prejudice in favor of vinyl. Nine times out of ten the listening experience from vinyl (even somewhat worn) beats CD's, HDCD's, SACD's and DVD-Audio. It doesn't matter which digital media is used, vinyl is almost always significantly better. Remember, the resolution of analog signals is continuous, so it has infinitely higher resolution than anything digital. The best digital sound comes from DSD (SACD), but it's still not analog.

I imagine a lot of people will disagree with me, but time will tell as other audiophiles weigh in on the subject. I am sorry if I sounded harsh, I am just trying to steer you readers towards the best sound.

If you have the vinyl, play that, and enjoy the best there is. If you have the old CD's, you don't need the new ones. If you have neither, you can get the new (and hardly improved) ones or seek out old versions. Have they inadvertently created a new market for the vintage Beatles CD releases? Wouldn't that be something.

In Place Upgrade from Windows 7 RC to RTM

When I loaded the Windows 7 RC on my studio PC (AKA the litterbox PC) I didn't think I would be able to upgrade to RTM. I thought that I would have to do a clean install. As it turns out, there is a simple procedure to allow an upgrade.

If you try to just upgrade form the RC or a beta, you get a message that you cannot do that, but there also is a little link that will take you to some instructions. Basically, you copy the install media somewhere and edit ..\sources\civersion.ini so that it reads:

[HostBuild]

MinClient=7100.0

MinServer=7100.0

Yesterday morning I dowloaded the RTM DVD from MSDN (it took around an hour - not bad), and in the late afternoon I ran the installation. I received warnings that iTunes should be deactivated (shocker there, that this peria would have a problem) and that there were two driver issues. For the drivers, I disabled the one device (one of the multiple disc controllers on this fancy-schmancy Gigabyte motherboard, and one I am not using) and I just plowed ahead on the other (the Edirol FA-101, about which I was confident things would be OK since I read it in such a fine blog).

Once again, Windows installer had maybe one more click, and then said I should just sit back and watch. It took a bit longer to run than the original amazing install of 20 minutes, and I could only watch the first 15 or 20 minutes because I was doing the whole thing via remote desktop! After the first reboot, it was another 20 minutes or so before I was able to RDP back in, activate Windows, and resume my BitTorrent seeding and whatnot.

Kudos to the many smart people at Microsoft who put together such a solid installation system for an incredibly complex piece of software. My cat thinks it is the most advanced desktop operating system in the world, but what does she know. In a couple weeks they should be releasing R2 for Windows Server 2008 for us MSDN subscribers. This is what I use for my desktop OS at work, and I think IT will be the most advanced desktop operating system in the world.

More on AVCHD and Blu-ray (and M2ts)

First, read my first post on the subject. I talk about the utilities I have found that are great for manipulating MKV files and creating an AVCHD file system, suitable for use with Blu-ray players.

For whatever reason, I have found that demuxing into the AVCHD file system format has some overhead - maybe 5-8%. It really shouldn't expand, but for some reason it does. This is enough that sometimes it is difficult to get things into a size that will fit on a DVD 5. I don't have a solution for this other than using some other utility to re-write the file with more compression.

I have found that a 4GB M2ts (MPEG 2 Transport Stream) file will turn into an AVCHD with enough room left to be comfortable - a 100% success rate. Using TXMuxer and MKVExtractGUI I have made some disks that work great.

About audio with AVCHD, like a DVD-Video, you can have a PCM track, but there will only be room for that if the video is compressed like mad, so you pretty much need to resign yourself to (a high bit rate) AC3 5.1. Blu-ray has some wonderful audio capabilities, but to get those, you will need the extra space of a Blu-ray. The AVCHD is limited to the two formats.

Bing vs. Google

A lot of people who saw me using Bing (ever since it came out) would chuckle and make remarks to the effect of having thought higher of me - that I wasn't a true Microsoft bigot. But I am, I give them a chance and the benefit of the doubt every time. They truly are a much more benevolent bunch than ANY of the large influences in the corporate world. But I try to be an open minded bigot. Hey, I got an iPhone (and learned how to make it work MY way), OK. That's my proof.

BING vs. GOOGLE

So Bing vs. Google. Google is an extremely useful tool. For casual users, it gives them what they need very efficiently. For power users, likewise, even better. It's indispensable. Bing comes at things from a completely different perspective. It seems to have a strong commercial slant. I am searching for something so I must want to buy it, or buy a book about it. This is great if I do, but more often I don't.

Bing also seems to have a strong bias to sites closely related to Microsoft and away from sites related to Google. If I search for topics on this blog in Google, they come up very high. Much less so in Bing. On SharePoint things they may not come up at all. That's not right. It could be said that Google has the bias toward their sites (which this is). Probably BOTH are true, but Google seem much better balanced.

Google is still much more useful for my day to day needs, and will be put back into the browsers where it was temporarily replaced by Bing. This will mean that I will Bing very seldom - probably about as often as I used Live - not very (but still more than I ever used Yahoo for anything - how could that mess be useful to anyone).

Edirol FA-101 Windows 7 64 Bit Drivers

The original post I had here was a work around. Roland published Windows 7 64 bit drivers in late 2009 and I have found them to work well with Windows 7. Go to Roland and get them.

If anyone has tried these drivers with Windows Server 2008 R2, please let me know. Thanks.

You really don't need the following information, but I leave it here for historical purposes.

Original Post:

Windows 7 again impressed me when I needed to load up my FA-101. I use the FA-101 as the only audio interface on my studio PC.

Doing a quick search you will find that there are no Windows 7 64 bit drivers for this device and if you try to run the Vista installer (FA_101_Vista_x64_Ver.1.0.4) you will get an error that it will not run for this version of Windows.

All you have to do is run Windows 7's (very cool) "Troubleshoot compatibility" wizard.

You select "Troubleshoot program" and check the "The program worked in earlier versions of Windows ..." box. Indicate that is was Vista, and then the driver installs as it did in Vista.

I have found the FA-101 to be much less susceptible to problems under Windows 7 than under Vista. Although the FA-101 driver did not contribute to my former 64 bit Vista's instability, the driver itself would frequently seem to get stuck. I was very used to powering off the FA-101 to un-stick it. So far, that has not been necessary with Windows 7. It continues to shine!

Windows 7 Amazing Installation

I lost one of the two 400 GB Western Digital drives in my RAID 0 array on my home "studio" PC on Sunday. The performance of two mediocre drives raided together has always been impressive, so I was determined to go back to it. This desktop machine was running 64 bit Vista, and was not particularly stable. I was hoping to put either Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 on it, and I was going to wait until fall.

Monday I bought two Seagate ST31000333AS 1TB drives from Antares Computing which arrived yesterday. I recommend both Antares and these drives (both are fast!). I only recommend RAID 0 if you can deal with losing the array (as I could). Reliability will be low - performance high.

So I take out the two old drives and stick in the two new ones. It takes longer than it should - thirty minutes - a little bit of cable manipulation and contortion (I never remove the full tower case from the rat's nest where it lives). Next I stick in the Windows 7 RC disk and boot. I think I had two clicks before it took off, and 20 minutes later it was done.

This bears repeating. Twenty minutes later, Windows was installed into previously unallocated space on freshly installed hard drives. I am sure I will have a lot of playing around to do (but I enjoy that - hit me). Twenty minutes. No formatting. Nothing.

Using MKV Files With a Memorex Blu-Ray Player

I naively bought a two Memorex MVBD 2510 players last fall - one for my dad and and one for myself. They were good Black Friday deals, so I have no buyer's remorse. I knew they didn't have an ethernet port, but I had no idea what good it might be. I still can only guess what utility I might get from having my player on my home network.

Like most of these players, it has a USB port, so I quickly got into experimentation and found that it would play MP4, AVI, and a mess of other file formats, but not every file format. Around the same time, MKV files started to become prevalent. The Memorex doesn't like MKV's but they play wonderfully from VLC on my computer (which has a 24" HD widescreen). I don't live and breath for this stuff, but I am an enthusiast, so it took me a while to understand why we needed yet another format!

MKV (Matroska) is a container. From what I can tell, it is lossless, and it gets a small amount of compression. They can hold a lot of stuff, but in order to use them with devices that don't support it (and aren't being well supported by the manufacturer), you have to do something with them. I have the answer for that!

You could get a conversion program that knows how to read these files and write them out to another format - like AVI or MP4. That means all your content is going through another rendering and compressing process. Although the results may be acceptable , I know there is no way doing this is going to improve the video or audio. And it takes a long time. We need something better.

The answer is demuxing the file (and maybe doing something cool with the demuxed content). Demuxing the MKV contents to a .ts file will work with the Memorex (and thus I would think many other - better - players). The tool to do this is TXMUXER. Demuxing is as fast as your disk (you will wish you had a fast disk setup) and there is no re-compression.

The only problem is (at least with the Memorex) that .ts files act a lot like AVI's or other files played on the Memorex - rewind, fast forward and other operations don't always work as you would like, but otherwise, it's not a bad arrangement. You get the nice menu from the player and you can select the files nicely (just don't make the name too long - no scrolling on the Memorex).

MKVExtractGUI includes the ability to extract files to a Blu-Ray or AVCHD folder structure that it creates. AVCHD is what you want. Many BD players (Memorex and Playstation 3 included) support AVCHD. It's basically a Blu-Ray file system for DVD 5 (4.7GB DVD recordable discs). I haven't explored all the audio possibilities of this (Blu-Ray includes several outstanding lossless formats). These AVCHD discs have no menu, but you can "join" multiple input files and add chapter stops at whatever point you like (think "episodes"). Just burn the two folders the process creates to a UDF file system on a DVD 5 (I have not yet tried this with a DVD 9, but that is coming).

With a little trial and error, I've come up with a nice way to play and store content.

Live Recording With the Zoom H2 (Part Two)

See also Part 1

My second recording with the H2 was a bit of a clandestine affair. Instead of bringing a mic stand to the show, I used the very nice, discrete black cloth bag that comes with the H2. This particular venue is a pretty laid back club - no strip search, metal detectors, etc. and I recorded there many times with my Rockbox. But sometimes it's best to take a "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

So the little, thin bag that comes with the H2 fits loosely on the device. It is acoustically transparent, so once I set levels, I simply left the bag on the table pointed towards the stage. I had recorded in this club many times so I knew that the best place to sit is right by the sound board. 

The recording came out far better than expected. Usually this room has a very boxy sound to it - there is nothing that can be done, it's a very boxy room. In this case the recording is much better than any previous I had made. Again, the mics pick up nicely and the 24 bit digital sounds smooth.

I am convinced the H2 was a good choice. I have several big shows coming up (check my calendar) so I hope to give it a workout. 

IPhone = Lotus Notes

I my have been drawn to this phone because this wonderful user interface is so similar to the "concentration game" tiles we have been using with Lotus Notes for DECADES.

Photo taken with an LG Vu!

Free the iPhone

I've had an iPhone for less than a week.  Sure it is very cool in many respects, but there is a big butt! Actually, there are a number of big butts, things about which an astute user might be upset.

There are the missing things, like Bluetooth for something other than a stupid earpiece. How about files and such. And MMS - we really need multimedia messaging - it will save the world and get us out of this recession.

And the dumb things that aren't there - like a clipboard. But of course there are good things. The UI, of course. And it works well as a phone. And many other things we expect a phone to do, it does well - play music, calculator, take pictures (this is really not that good), SMS texting, etc., you know, phone things. It is a great phone for those.

Then there are the crazy apps. The vast majority are crappy things - toys for wasting time. I am not a gamer, so I have not evailuated those capabilities (not do I care to). The minority of apps are somewhat useful, or gee-whiz information that is amazing to have so conveniently in your pocket.

I like it, and it can stay. 

The Big Issue

There is something outside of my drivel that is a topic of contention - the freedom for an application developer to create something for the iPhone platform. It seems that Apple is trying very hard to stifle this. If you tried to create a new Mail client, for instance, forget it, Apple won't let you distribute it.

This is wrong. It's un-American. Remember? Freedom? We used to value it. We cannot let corporations or governments dictate our actions like this. We don't have to take this without a fight. Think about it.

Being locked to iTunes is simply silly. Tethering users to a moronic user interface, designed to sell them more stuff is insulting. So it should be obvious that I will be avoiding Apple's proprietary setup. Having a closed system so that something works reliably is OK, but having it so you can control consumer behavior is unacceptable. 

The "Jailbreaking" community seems to have a lot of junk out there too, just like the Apple apps store. I think the only way for Apple to make this ethically right is to reconcile with Jailbreakers and mainstream the process of freeing the platform. From what I've heard, this is another point of view I have taken where I am on the losing side.

Launching Directly into Lotus Notes Applications

Launching Lotus Notes directly into an application is dangerous to workstation stability. To qualify this statement, launches with versions up to 6.5.x were always unstable. I am an ex-Notes developer and a little behind. I am just getting into 8.5.1, but I am not going to retest this behavior until 8.5.1 is completely rolled out (and the need arises).

There are a number of ways to do launches directly - .lnk files, shortcuts into a document, the Notes://ServerName/Directory/DatabaseName.nsf format embedded in HTML. All of these work. Sometimes. For a while. If everything works out OK. But they will consistently fail and cause Notes to crash. 

It would be great for a Notes guru, who somehow still cared about version 6.5, etc., to come along and tell me I am wrong. I welcome that. If anybody has had good experiences with Notes launches, let me know.

A little history: we use the Lotus Notes email platform because of it's ability to handle many terabytes of mail. It has aways been the most scalable and secure mail product. I have worked with Notes as an application platform since version 3 (1993), and it has always been one of my favorites. We put a moratorium on new Notes apps several years back. I was fortunate to have been assigned to creating our SharePoint environment, starting in 2005. 

Along the way, there have been several attempts at links like this, and they have always failed. Also keep in mind that we work in a fairly well controlled environment - standardized desktop and server setups, etc., and it still always fails. I am not anxious to try this again with Notes 8x, but I guess that will be necessary at some point.