Apple TV arrived in Sydney

My Apple TV just arrived here in Sydney.

Not much I can say so far except the box is pretty nice. It shipped on the 20th and just arrived now, a bit longer than expected.

Later: Now that I've got it going, here's my impressions:

• Very easy to set up, booted, on the network, shows a number that you key into the iTunes you want to pair it with.
• By default it started syncing all my Music. I didn't buy this thing to play music on the TV so I've changed that default.
• iTunes immediately tried to sell me music videos, which is about all there is in Australia at the moment, I fell for it and bought a few clips.
• The TV trailers are tantalising, Lost, Grey's Anatomy, etc etc. Of course we can't buy any of these in Australia. Grrr...
• The interface lags a little but probably because it was madly trying to sync my music library.
• Visually, looks lovely.
  

We don't have cable TV and I'm prepared, keen in fact, to spend the money that would have gone on cable, on purchasing shows I really want to see.

Issues:

• It doesn't play everything I can play in iTunes. Not sure why, I've got a quicktime movie in my library that won't sync over.
• Some videos, including movie trailers from Apple lose their Video/Audio sync pretty badly.
• iTunes kind of forgot about my iPod for a while. Had to re-boot the iPod, seems ok now.
• They need a black version, after all, most flat screen TVs come in black.
• Why doesn't the volume control work? The nifty remote control only has 6 buttons and two of the don't do anything.

I'm happy with the product and very much enjoyed watching video podcasts in bed last night. Can't wait to buy a TV show or movie.

Home brew meeting at Dural

On Sunday I attended a technical meeting of the NSW home brew radio group. Steven, pictured gave an excellent demo of some of the the metal work skills needed to make chassis to hold projects. So many things I don't know. Some more pictures.

The meeting was held at the WIA Dural site, where they do the NSW Sunday broadcast. I've listened for many years on Sunday mornings so it was great to have a look around.

I got my amateur license back in 1978 with a group of friends, after moving to Sydney and finding that the internet has become my main form of communication, radio faded for a while but since the dropping of the Morse code means I can use HF I've come back and feel more interested than ever, in particular I'm keen to learn to make HF circuits.

FatBlog 75.4

A few years ago I returned from living in Hong Kong to find that my weight had crept up to 82Kg. Amazing how this can happen without noticing. I did feel bad and bloated.

My workplace had a few people in the same boat as me and kindly they organised a weight loss program that worked very well for me. I lost 10Kgs, mostly by replacing snack food with carrots.

Once again, my weight is creeping up so about ten weeks ago I started trying to lose some weight again. I record my daily weight in the morning. Above is a graph of my weight once a week on Fridays. (I'm being kind to my self as I always go up over the weekends).

Things I've learned about losing weight:

• Can't do it by starving, hunger is a very strong drive, you might beat it for a while but it will win.
• Can do it by replacing one filling food with another with less energy in it. I lost 10Kg by eating lots of carrots.
• Can do it by stopping eating when you are satisfied. (It's a real trap that you'll finish the whole plate just because it's there).
• Exercise makes me hungry and may not result in weight loss.
• Exercise needs to be sustainable, I know if I join the gym I won't keep going in the long term. Walking on the way home, however, seems sustainable.
• Don't worry about daily fluctuations. Actual weight is mostly water and that goes up and down often by 1 or 2 kilos. Track weekly results and don't panic if one day goes the wrong way.
  

I'm not going to blog on my weight very much but hopefully this post will shame me into staying focussed.

Apple TV shipped!

Got an email over night that my Apple TV has shipped. I ordered at 5am local time, on the morning they were announced so I guess I'm at the front of the queue.

What's the best way to convert DivX to H.264....

Improving construction and the nature of blogs

It goes without saying that blogs are a diary and the writer moves on as they write. For some reason I'm interested in learning how to make things. 

Tonight I re-made a crystal oscillator built a few days ago, as you see it's more compact and professional looking. (They both work by the way).

I'm on a learning path and happily there are wonderful folks out there who have selflessly shared their knowledge. I'd like to pay tribute to a few generous people I've come across:

• Alan
• James
• Ralph
• Peter
• The SolderSmoke folks
• This QRP page (don't worry about the broken images at the top)
• Frank

And many others.

There's a few things that mystify me in constructing electronics:

• Capacitor markings
• Winding inductors
• Complex numbers (although my daughter seems to understand them)

I'll get there...

Manhattan pad construction

I've been trying to find a way to make one-off electronic construction projects. After a few false starts this looks like one I can get good at. It's known as "Manhattan Pad" construction method.

The circuit is built on top of copper board, unlike "ugly construction" components are joined by soldering them to little pads of copper board, cut up and super glued on to the base board. This makes it much easier to solder component by component for those of us who don't have three hands.

Here is my first go, a simple VFO that covers 3-4Mhz. Once in a nice box with connectors on the outside you'd never know it wasn't a professional job. Having the components close to a ground plane helps with RF stability too.

Apologies for my tiny steps, hopefully I will get on to more interesting projects soon.

Radio New Zealand (RNZI) back on DRM

Just noticed that Radio New Zealand has started transmitting digital radio using the DRM system again. It's the best DRM signal I can get here. So far very patchy decoding for me, the picture to the right is about the best signal I've got so far.

My receiver is a DRT1 controlled via serial from the Dream software.

As I write (approaching 6pm AEST) the signal is improving and I'm getting a signal to noise radio of 20dB sometimes which gives perfect decoding.

Update: It's 9pm AEST and I'm getting perfect decoding with 28dB SNR. Changing "Time Sync Tracking" to "First Peak" seems to improve things for me.

Ham radio Sydney to Melbourne

I've had a ham radio license since 1988. Never managed to learn morse code. I'm vk2tpm.

Now that morse code has been dropped I have an advanced licence and can use HF for the first time, very exciting. 

New to all this but basically it means you can talk to people about 1,000 km away. I'm from Melbourne and moved to Sydney about 20 years ago so I'd like to talk to my friends there. 

Dave, vk3ase, has a regular test transmission on 3.670Mhz AM on Saturday night. 

It's very strong here, a solid S9, but there's a lot of band noise tonight. We had a bit of a chat of SSB but it wasn't easy going, mostly as I was switching between SSB and AM and messing things up along the way.

By the way the IC-7000 is the best radio I've ever used.

A week without the internet, at home

Last weekend we had an electical storm. I unplugged all the radios but forgot about the cable modem. It died.

It took Optus 5 days to send someone out. They gave me 12:00 - 5:00pm as a time range, couldn't ring first or anything, so I had to stay home waiting for the guy to come. He turned up at 11:30.

We had five days without internet at home. Amazing the impact. I read the newspaper, it's not as good as reading RSS feeds, but not bad. Over priced if you ask me.

The kids were distraught. They basically said that they couldn't do their homework without the internet. 

We also lost an ethernet switch and the ethernet port on a Mac Mini.

Software defined radio (SDR) is totally cool

I got into this via my interest in digital radio. Computers are now fast enough to do the processing required to demodulate radio intermediate frequency in real time. 

You can therefore have a very simple bit of hardware radio frequency down conversion that feeds into the audio port of your computer and the rest is done in software.

SDR gives you an incredibly full featured radio, with more dials and displays (all virtual), than you could want. I've been aware of GNURadio for some time, but it's pretty hard to get started with.

There is even software for the Mac from the incredibly friendly Kok Chen (with source!). I notice that hamlib builds just fine on the mac and the command line tools work. This means you can control many "hard" receivers via a serial port (works with USB adapters). So far I haven't found a nice cocoa client that uses hamlib so I'm working on one myself.

I paid rather too much money for the nifty DRT1 from Sat-Schnider and have spent the weekend playing with software and mounting it in an external box. This thing is controlled by commands over a serial port (it has no display at all - I've added a power LED). It converts a slab of radio down to audio which you feed into your computer for demodulation.

There are several software radios around, the one shown above is from Peter Carnegie, but there's also the Dream software for DRM decoding.

Seems to me that this kind of thing might be built at very low cost using an NE602 balanced mixer and synthesized oscillator controlled by a PIC microprocessor or something.

I heard today on the WIA Sunday broadcast that the BBC is to begin trials of DRM (Digital Radio Modiale) on medium wave. Perhaps radio is set for another revolution, AM -> FM -> DRM.

If it doesn't work in Safari, get a newer build!

I like Safari on the Mac but there's some things it doesn't have so I use FireFox to plug those holes. A good example is that right now Safari doesn't have the rich text editor that Blogger uses to edit posts in wysiwyg format.

The underlying rendering code in Safari is based on KHTML which is open source. It turns out that new builds are available here and what you get is a version of Safari that has new features. The app is called WebKit and it can co-exist on your Tiger system along side current Safari. It picks up all of your settings and bookmarks so it's an easy transition.

They seem to build very frequently, often several times a day. I'm posting this with the Friday 23rd Feb build and it seems solid so far.

You get a nice gold rimmed icon too.

Backing up is so hard to do.. but necessary

My MacBook wouldn't boot up on Monday.

It also wouldn't boot off a Tiger install DVD. I figured it was dead. Luckily I have been backing up my Documents folder with rsync to an external drive on a daily basis, so I wasn't devastated.

I found my proof of purchase and rang Apple Australia to get a case number for the inevitable return to a service centre. To my surprise they helped me out.

I had upgraded the hard drive (as well as RAM). When it stopped booting, I put back the original drive but it still didn't boot off a Tiger DVD so I figured it wasn't the disk. On the phone to Apple I learned some new things:

• The original DVD that comes with your mac has extra diagnostic stuff on it that update DVDs don't.
  
• Hold down the D key while booting to get to hardware diagnostics on that original disk.

It takes some time to re-install everything and find all the application serial numbers I have so I'm looking at doing some sort of full disk backup in the future. For now I'm using the Apple Backup utility that you get with a .Mac subscription. It seems good so far for backing up my whole home directory.

Greg Winn is so wrong - we need a new phone OS

It's been reported in The Age that Telstra's Greg Winn thinks that Apple should not enter the mobile phone business. He's so wrong.

I've experienced a series of mainstream expensive phones from Sony Ericsson, Motorolla, and Nokia. Aside from the basic functionality of making and taking calls, the extra "smart" stuff tends to be confusing to use, buggy and often slow.

My current phone, a Nokia 6233, can be routinely crashed simply by forwarding an MMS. I'm no basic user, I want internet, bluetooth, MMS and email. Some of the things shown in the Apple iPhone launch, like easy conference calling are probably possible but I dare not attempt them.

Current phone operating systems from Symbian, and Palm haven't scaled well up to the requirements of multi-threaded networking applications. Microsoft's Windows Mobile is looking pretty good these days (used to crash in earlier versions) but I hear the battery life is terrible on some devices.

We desperately need operating systems on phones that are built for the internet, you can't go past unix in that department. Where are the Linux phones? Apple takes great care with user interface, iPods have amazing depth of functionality in them yet they seem so simple to use, the competition has transformed the portable digital player marketplace over the past few years, I hope the iPhone does the same for the phone business.

I wonder what phone Greg Winn uses, and can he figure out how to set the APN for his MMS without going mad?

Getting in to Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM)

I'm really interested in the next step for broadcast radio, called DRM. (Yes another DRM). Digital Radio Mondiale sends audio as a low bit rate AAC stream. At this stage there aren't many radio sets out there, and they're pretty expensive.

An alternative for technical folks, like you and me, is to modify a radio to get the 455Khz intermediate frequency out and mix it down to a low (audio) frequency that can be decoded on a computer with software. (Find DREAM).

I've ordered, and quickly received, a tiny mixer board that should do the trick. While it came with a circuit, they skipped the pinouts and I figured this might be handy for other too, so it's shown above. Note that I may well have this wrong at this point, I'll update this post if I find an error while getting it going. (1 update so far).

Now, to start pulling my nice radio apart...

Update: I pulled my FRG-100 apart, tapped the 455kHz IF, and have started to receive DRM transmissions. It's pretty bad at this stage as you can hear but I'm sure I can improve things with tweaking.

The dream software is amazing and if you understand it I'm sure let's you really see what's going on. Here's a screenshot.

Having just returned from this year's Wyong field day I'm all fired up to look at GNURadio.

Notes on DRM with the Yaesu FRG-100: I took the suggestions from here and tapped VR1002 to get 455kHz. I didn't change out the filter and perhaps that's why I'm not having much luck. The waveform looks 10kHz wide though.

My antenna is a 20m long wire across the back yard and in the evening it overloads the receiver, I now have an attenuator that I hope will help in that regard.

NSW Rail queues

Catching public transport is an important part of keeping up with my Podcast subscriptions. Normally it's pretty tolerable, but this morning, a Monday, the queues were crazy.

This is Chatswood station. It's being upgraded at the moment so that explains some of the chaos. You can't see it clearly in the picture but there are two queues of perhaps a hundred people each, one at the window and the other at the automated ticket machine.

Here's my humble suggestions to improve things:

• Introduce contactless pre-paid cards, like the Hong Kong Octopus cards (from Western Australia I understand anyway).
• Of course, make the ticket gates take those contactless cards.
• Replace the bad ticket machines with ones that are easier to use and faster to operate. The current ones are terrible and also unreliable.
• Ban marketing people distributing their brochures at the narrowest part of the exit during peak hours.
• Consider having some all standing carriages for peak hours.

I'm no expert but I do catch public transport and have experienced it in several countries.

Home brew electronics

When I was young I used to build simple electronics circuits. Then I got a job as a technician, wielding a soldering iron every day. That killed the hobby for a long time.

The fabulous Wyong Field day draws closer and each year at this time I get interested in radio and electronics again. While reading all the wireless news I stumbled across a local home brew group who have a contest to build an 80m AM transmitter. Great idea, pity it has to be at least 20W, that's a bit much for me.

To see if I am capable of building something that makes RF, I thought I'd start really small and build a 4MHz crystal oscillator from a circuit here. Spent the $7 to get the bits, but how to construct the thing?

My old mate Ralph builds lots of RF gear and he showed me a technique where you take printed circuit board and use a Dremel or similar electric grinding tool to cut insulating tracks in the copper. Then you solder the components across the tracks on the copper side. Did that, it worked!

Update: It turns out this technique is one variant of Ugly Construction.

Impressive job titles

I once corresponded with a person about some software I'd written. His signature labeled him as working on the "room temperature superconductor project". After we'd written back and forth a few times I asked him how that project was going.

He laughed and revealed that it was their internal name for an SAP migration project.

Anyhow, I thought I'd follow suit and have been adding little interesting titles to my email .signature, it's rare that anyone notices or at least comments. Here's a few ideas, please suggest more.

My colleague Ben is an "Anti-matter containment" specialist.

• Black hole maker
• Faster than light networking specialist
• Reality engineer
• Discombobulator
• Metron measurer
• Photon decelerator
  
• Astral travel agent
• Ball lightning capturer
• Dark matter counter
• Five dimensional computation specialist

Does ebay sell everything?

When searching Google I notice that you often get an ad suggesting that the very item you were looking for is available right now on eBay.

This often leads to disappointment as you click through and find nothing.

I was wondering about the limits of their claims and noticed, for example, that if you search for "eBay Fraud" you get a nice banner offering just that, and at a bargain price!

Disappointing to see that on clicking through ebay reports "0 items found for ebay fraud".

iTunes love it or hate it

Noticed a great feature of iTunes. Listening to a Podcast/Netcast on an iPod, didn't get all the way to the end, docked the iPod then thought I'd scroll through the program to the spot I was up to and listen to the rest. When I clicked on the podcast it knew where I was up to and played from there. Really neat.

At a party on Saturday, I spoke to a friend, Kati. Her kids have iPods, she hates the way they work. The iPods were opened at a friend's house where they immediately plugged them in to his computer, whereupon they sync'd with his music collection. Of course when they went home and plugged the iPods in to their home computer it told them that all the music would be erased!

I think iPods should have a simple mode where they mount as a disk and you just drag music on to them. The sync method is great for many people but for some it's counter-intuitive and infuriating.

Moved my kids from one Mac to another the other day. Naturally, they wanted all their tunes and pictures on the new machines. All I had to do was copy the "iTunes Music" folder from the Music folder on the old to the Music folder on the new machine. (Same with the iPhoto Library folder in Pictures). Great stuff!

The only painful part is the DRM which means I have to deauthorise and authorise to move the few purchased tracks over. My kids are mystified about DRM. It punishes consumers.

iTunes is good and bad. Personally, I think Apple's losing the plot on this one. It's getting too complex, there are menu items I can't explain. Why is "Transfer Purchases from iPod" needed? Why is "Subscribe to Podcast" in the Advanced menu. For that matter, any application with an Advanced menu doesn't belong in the Apple in-house design stable.

Speed up your Mac

I'm familiar with "bit rot" where Windows computers seem to slow down over time and in the end seem to need a clean install to get them right again, but it seemed to be happening with my Macs.

The built in Activity Monitor is a wonderful tool for seeing what's going on. I ran it and found that I had forgotten about some of the things that were running, including postgresql, mysql, various daemons for scanners, printers, pda's and even cameras.

The worst offendor was Caplio Mounter, an abomination that was taking gobs of memory and using too much CPU for something that is idle but waiting for a camera to connect.

Select a process in Activity Monitor and "inspect" it, you get wonderful, readable information about what it's up to and even all the files it has open. Very interesting.

Regrettably, there is no framework for uninstallers on the Mac. This really needs to be fixed! I had to trawl around the /Library/StartupItems directory moving things out. There is a Control Panel called Diablotin that does a pretty good job at managing Startup Items too.

After turning off a bunch of unused things, (I even had Apache running), my machine is clearly faster to start up and more responsive.