Simon Griffiths Blog

I have just bought the AWA DP747 DVD player and have set it up and watched a couple of videos on it over the past 12 hours or so.

First impression was a good price for the features, which include playback of mp4 format video from a memory card or USB stick.

When setting up you get the typical Chinese, rather garish splash screen (I often wonder, do they think apples designs are drab and lacking in colour). Running the setup on the tv was painful though. I have connected my standard def but 16:9 format tv using standard yellow (video) and red and white (audio) cables supplied in the box. I am not sure that these connection are important, but I cannot select the tv format to be 16:9, the option is just greyed out. Other options are pretty standard, but that one means that I cannot get full use of the widescreen format (and let’s face it, the native resolution) of the DVD. I will try other connections over the next few days, but that is just annoying.

On the flipside, video reproduction seems good, and the discs themselves spin very quietly, making my foxtel iq seem even more annoyingly loud.

Mp4 playback was interesting in that it didn’t pick up a mac formatted disc, but when I moved a film to a memory stick, it worked well, again with good reproduction. I have yet to try an h.264 formatted movie with the m4v extension iTunes uses and will report back on that.

Overall I would recommend this DVD player if you connect by hdmi or component, or have a standard def 4:3 form factor tv. If like me you have a 16:9 tv and want to use standard video, yellow cable, stay clear as the squeezing of the image will drive you nuts!

UPDATE: 26 October 2010

This DVD player has just died, so you can get a rough idea that this one lasted about a year and a half. Overall it has been a good machine. The only problems I have come across are: -

• It has crashed a few times, particularly when you try to access something when it is first starting up. Once it has done this it just locks and the only way to restart it is to pull the plug. Once you’ve done that a few times you just make sure you wait for 20-30 seconds after hitting the start button before you try and eject a DVD.
• When it finally died, it did so with a DVD in the tray. To get that DVD out of a machine that had no power meant that I had to take the whole thing apart, literally! Even the DVD drive itself didn’t seem to have a manual way to eject so I had to take that apart too!

Okay so this is a bit of an over the top title, but I was hoping to attract attention because this might just help you, as it has me over the last year.

First things first though. What is iritis? If you have it you probably know all too well, but in short form, it is:-

• Swelling of the iris in the eye
• Caused by your immune system attacking your own body (auto-immune issue)
• Can be caused by a million different thing

I first started getting iritis about 3 years ago, and was getting it increasing frequently until recently. I have been tested for all the usual suspects, genetic markers and even some forms of deseases I would have hated to have told my girlfriend about. All were negative.

Each time I got iritis was pretty much the same. I had a cold or viral infection of some kind, fought it off, then my immune system seemed to look for other things to sort out, which was usually bits of me! I always got a big ulcer in the roof of my mouth, followed by iritis about a week or so after the ulcer. This could be a good few weeks after I’d originally been sick.

To sort out iritis when I got it, I did the usual. Drops to dilate the pupil, and steroid drops to sort out the problem. Uncomfortable, annoying, and potentially giving me cateracts way before I want them.

In the last year I have managed to avoid iritis completely, and with very little effort. I read an article on immune disorders saying how good Yakult like drinks were (you know the lactobacillus little drinks you get in the shops). Since then I have been taking those. This may be a complete fluke, but I am convinced it helps. When I start getting the ulcer, I up my dose to 2-3 bottles a day, and the ulcer goes, and no iritis.

By the way, I also tried the powder in the bottles, but this didn’t seem to work as well.

Anyway, if you are reading this. Please give it a go. It has helped me.

If it does the same to you, please put a comment in this post as I would like to pass it on to any researchers who are interested.

I have just been working on my first PDF portfolio. This is the new Acrobat 9 feature that let’s you put a heap of different file formats together and make them into almost a mini Ajax website.

I had thought this would be complicated, but actually it was a piece of cake when you just customize their templates. Managed to add a load of PDFs, flash videos from animoto and other bits and pieces in a few minutes.

Probably my only negative comment would be that navigation is not consistent sometimes there are breadcrumbs, sometimes not. Also not checked yet in older versions of acrobat.

As you may know from previous posts I have bought an Appletv and connected via HDMI to my computer monitor.

I am starting to build up some content on it so thought I would buy a lead to connect to my main tv which is scart or s-video. I bought a foxtel lead for almost $70 which I was told would be ok as it is basically a scart-component video out.

Unfortunately I have not been able to get this to work at all. Not even to get sound. I am not sure why as it doesn’t look like it could be 1 way (it is actually made to take scart output of foxtel box and send it to component tv).

Anyway, moral of the story is don’t buy this lead! Maybe use bits and pieces combo solution instead!

After another post pushing the virtues of a wireless system rather than a wired NBN, I have the following comments which I made on an article in iTWire.

- The wireless system is capable of reasonably high speed, but there is a latency issue which means anything where packet priority (read Skype/VOIP) is an issue, wireless will be a problem. Not surprising then that Telstra is pushing it as it will mean they keep their expensive phone line rentals.
- ADSL2+ is great if you live 10m from the exchange. Go onto whirlpool and you can see all the people that upgraded to 2+ and got no change in speed over standard ADSL. This is because speed drops off quickly the further you are from the exchange.
- FttN is really expensive to implement and speeds they are looking at seems to be no higher than you can get anyway. In 5 years time they will seem pathetic (as our speeds do now to much of the world)
- BPL (Broadband over power line) could have potential in the bush, and is currently being rolled out in the US for remote locations

In short there is no clear answer. The best solution would be a combination of the above. Maybe no fibre nodes within 1km of an exchange where ADSL2+ would be better, fibre nodes in the city and BPL in the country. One thing that seems clear though is that wireless is a supplementary connection and shouldn’t be regarded as your main connection unless we want to cripple our VOIP service and keep Telstra shareholders happy for the next 10 years!

I have just finished listening to the excellent SecurityNow podcast on the first WPA hack. Having heard some of the recommendations I went into my Airport Utility to try to set it to only use AES not TKIP encryption. Trouble is I didn’t get those options.

However what I did find is a setting which lets you change the WPA Group Key timeout. As the WPA hack requires a minimum of 12 minutes for the first intrusion, changing the WPA Group Key timeout to anything less than 12 minutes should prevent the hack from working.

The other bit I like about this is that it takes less than 30 seconds to do (not including resetting your Airport).

WPA Hack – Secure your Apple Airport

IBM has recently announced that they are going to put in a broadband over powerline (BPL) system to

“targeted primarily at rural areas in the US where the sparse population has prevented other ISPs from laying down lines for cable and DSL services”

In Australia on the other hand we seem locked in to providing a fibre to the node (FttN) system to 98% of the population, which will include a large area which is remote and difficult/expensive to lay fibre to.

It seems to me that a BPL system would suit the Australian environment even better than the US. It would be fine to lay fibre in the major cities, but to keep the costs down, it doesn’t make sense to do the same in country areas. In the same breath, country areas should have equal access to broadband as the city. This technology seems the perfect fit.

For more info see: -

http://news.theage.com.au/technology/ibm-to-help-build-broadband-network-in-power-lines-20081112-5ntf.html

 http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2230428/ibm-gets-back-bpl-business

AppleTV

Having been frustrated with the AppleTV in my last post, I have got a workaround which seems to do the job for me.

In iTunes preferences, click on the advanced tab. At the bottom of the first section is the checkbox to “Copy files to the iTunes folder when adding to library”. Unchecking this box allowed me to add the videos stored on my external hard drive into iTunes, without overloading my laptop. From there they then synced over to the AppleTV, and seem to stay there even when the hard drive is disconnected from my laptop.

Okay, I’ll admit it’s hardly ideal! I am hoping that by using appropriate commands I won’t get files littering my hard drive, but at least it makes the AppleTV useful!

I got an AppleTV the other day and have got it all hooked up. It is very slick, but really annoying in one respect and unfortunately that is why I actually bought it.

First I should explain that I have a small child, so the first thing I like to do with a new DVD is back it up. This is from experience of knowing it can last anything from a week onwards.

Obviously this gives me a management problem. I usually put films on my 80gb iPod video and that is very full. I now either delete ones he doesn’t want to watch anymore, or back them up to an external drive using Senuti to pull them off the iPod. I have a MacBook with a 120gb drive which only has 10gb left so I don’t have the option of keeping them on my mac.

So I bought the appletv with a 160gb hard drive so I could move the films off the iPod and onto the appletv. Trouble is that the sync is either automatic or semi-automatic. No manual management.

That means that I am effectively only able to use a few GB of the drive, unless of coarse I buy everything again from the iTunes store. This seems really odd on apples part. Why would you do it one way for the iPod and another for appletv?

The end result is that I really can’t use the atv to anywhere near it’s full potential. So I am left with a choice of using a device that should work for what I need it for, but doesn’t or hacking it so it will work!

What to do, what to do! Any advice out there?

Pushing wireless internet to faster and is probably a master move from Telstra. Increasing the speed of wireless seems to make it more and more attractive to the user (obviously there are the limits per tower). However the big strategy seems to me to be that a wireless network has high latency making VOIP next to useless. This means that it is fine for browsing, but Telstra maintains its stranglehold on the public which would need to keep their landlines.

Obviously this is great for Telstra shareholders, which the board of Telstra reports to at the end of the day, but useless for customers. Just one more reason why structural separation is probably the only way to go.

I have particular experience of this trying to use Skype video conference with someone using a wireless dongle in the UK. Both systems report 8MB down, but there is a huge issue with dropped packets on their end.