Mick West

This is in Hebden Bridge, near to Bingley, where I grew up.    If my life had a taken a few different turns, this could have been me:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8548110@N06/516706022/

Just downloaded the iPhone wordpress app. Seems to work quite well.

Is my computer now redundant? I think not, but it’s nice for blogging on the run.

[Update again - This is probably fixed in the new update.  So the real fix is now to connect your PS3 to the internet before you start playing - it will then download and install the patch]

I’d played GTA for a few hours, all seemed well. I then upgraded my PS3 system software (although this might not have been the root cause, based on comments below), to get the new Playstation Store. That went well, new store looks nice. But then I try to play GTA-IV, and it just hangs on the loading screen saying “LOADING - CLEAN GETAWAY” (the name of the last mission).

I tried various combinations of resetting and re-inserting the disk, nothing worked. So I then went to the “Game Data Utility” (at the top of the “Games” tab), and selected the GTA data, and deleted it (press Triangle, then select delete). This does not delete your saved game, but forces it to re-load all the data it had cached. I figured maybe there was something OS specific in the cached data. Anyway, rebooted, it re-cached all the data (”Installing data to hard disk drive“), and then IT WORKED. Phew! And poor work, Sony and/or Rockstar.

Step by step

1. Take GTA Disk Out
2. Reboot
3. On the “Game” tab, go to the top and select “Game Data Utility”
4. Select GTA, and press Triangle
5. Select Delete, then Okay.
6. Re-insert disk and start game
7. Game will re-load all the data, taking a few minutes.
8. It should now load the last saved game, hopefully!

[UPDATE] Stefan suggest a simpler fix. Try this first as it’s much quicker.

1. quit the game
2. sign out of psn
3. sign back in to psn
4. load game

Note I’ve not actually tried Stephan’s method, as deleting the game data worked for me. It could be there’s multiple bugs causing similar symptoms - just try both fixes.

[UPDATE 2] I had it crash again, so I signed out of PSN (did not bother to sign in again), and it worked.

Books I’ve read since Feb 4th 2008, with a ranking out of five of how much I enjoyed reading them.

1984 by George Orwell. (4/5)
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (4/5)
Sabriel by Garth Nix (4/5)
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (4/5)
A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian, by Marina Lewycka (3.5/5)
What is the What, By Dave Eggars (4/5)
World War Z: An Oral History, by Max Brooks (4.5/5)
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (3/5)
What is the What by Dave Eggars (4/5)
Lirial by Garth Nix (4/5)
Abhorsen by Garth Nix (4/5)
13 Bullets by David Wellington (3/5)
American Gods by Neil Gaiman (4/5)
The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman (3.5/5)
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch (4/5)
Gate of Ivrel by C.J. Cherryh (3.5/5)
Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta (4/5)
The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester (4.5/5)
In the Woods by Tana French (4.5/5)  (Finished July 2nd, 2008)

So, my latest project is to actually wire the condo, to get around the slow and unreliable wireless connection and allow faster streaming to the XBox360 and PS3. The last wiring I did (for this same purpose) was in the Oregon house, where I laid Cat5e cables via the roof space. This was relatively straightforward, as I could get up there. But being in a condo means very limited access to the space above the ceiling, and one of my ceilings is twelve feet high. It seemed much simpler to use existing wiring.

There are actually four type of existing wires I could use. There’s the power lines, the phone lines, the cable TV lines and the TV antenna lines. The last two are basically the same thing, and luckily this condo is wired (more of less), with two sets of coaxial cables going to each spot where there’s a cable TV outlet. One is the CATV, and the other connects (presumably) to the rooftop antenna, shared by the building. That means it’s basically unused, since we just use cable TV.

Power line and phone line networking were discounted because of the slow speeds (10 Mbps, or so I thought, actually 200 is claimed now) and the unreliable nature of unshielded cables being dual-wielded, this leaves the coaxial (128 Mbps), with the obvious choice being the spare set of coaxial cables that can be dedicated to this new network.

There are a few competing technologies for this kind of thing, most notably: MoCA, and HomePNA, which comes in two flavors: phone line networking, and coaxial networking, which is sometimes called HCNA. The entire thing seems surprisingly fringe, and I had quite some trouble finding where to buy the equipment. I found a few options, but very few actually for sale.

• The Dynamix HP-30 Coax. (Unknown price)
• SendTek’s CET-330 (Unknown Price)
• Coaxsys TVNET/C PRO Target (”normally $199″, but price unknown)
• ReadyLinks IPCoax 602 (Unknown price)

Then some that you could apparently buy:

• The Highwire Connect ($179)
• The Alpha Telecom HPCE-322M ($83)
• Scientific Atlanta’s DPH548 ($128) (see pic, right)

[UPDATE:  The link to the DPH548 goes to VTI, who now don't seem to sell it, and have replaced it with something that looks like the HPCE-322M]

The Highwire seemed more readily available, but is too expensive, and seems like it works in pairs, rather than a broadcast over shared wire. Of the cheaper two that I could actually order online, the HPCE-322M and the DPH548 looked fairly similar. Indeed I would not be surprised if they had the same chip inside. They seem to offer the same set of ports: cable in and out, two ethernet ports, power, a two-position switch (host/client) and some blinkenlights.

I decided on the DPH548, swayed by the “In Stock Now”, the nice diagrams of wired house, and the fact that it’s made by a company owned by Cisco. They have a nice little brochure on the adapter. It’s a bit more expensive, but I like to have a modicum of reassurance. I’m slightly concerned that there seems to be only this one obscure store on the internet selling them. It seems like they are restricting sales to installers? I don’t know. Perhaps this technology is just going out of fashion, since more people use wireless.

So I’ve ordered three of them. One will sit by the main router in my office, which is connected to the DSL line (hopefully soon to be some kind of FiOS). That one will act as the host. One will sit behind the TV, and will be connected via a switch to the Wii, the PS3 and the 360. The last one will be connected to Holly’s computer. Those will both be configured as clients.
Speeds are promised as a sustained 80Mbps. We shall see. That’s actually slower than the best wireless out there (802.11n), but I’m hoping that in addition to being much more reliable, the real-world throughput will work out higher (Wikipedia lists actual 11n throughput as 74Mbps).

Now, the diagram on the right here shows the adapter sharing the wiring with the Cable TV system. Apparently this should work just fine, seeing as the DPH548 uses the frequencies in the range of 12-28Mhz, whereas “existing RF Video” is apparently 54-860Mhz). However, I don’t trust this at all, and since I have these spare cable runs, I’m going to put it all on it’s own dedicated cables, disconnected from anything else. I think this will give me a cleaner signal, and prevent any interference with the cable TV. Plus it should give me room to change over to some meatier cable network later. I mean, coaxial cable can theoretically support several Gbps - like with all those cable TV shows in HD.

Installation

While waiting for them to arrive, I tidied up the wiring I was going to use. There are eight antenna coaxial cables which converge in the wiring closet (actually just a closet) along with the CATV cables. I found the three of them that went to the locations I needed (by plugging in a small TV, and then unplugging cables until the signal went out). I then removed these three cables from the antenna splitter, and connected them all together with a single 3-way splitter.

The image above shows the closet. Originally there were two sets of cables: the “C” cables (CATV), which go into the two splitters on the left (for five TVs) and the “A” cables (Antenna), which used to go to the eight-way splitter at the bottom. Here you can see the new splitter on the right, and the three “A” cables I’ve combined into a new network with the 2-Way splitter acting as a 3-way combiner.

The adapters were shipped very promptly by NTI. The boxes they are in are labeled “WebSTAR”, which is Scientific Atlanta’s cable modem brand. There’s a sticker on the box that says ETH-COAX, which is what NTI call it, and a handwritten serial number (112). Peeling this off reveals the actual Scientific Atlanta sticker, which looks a bit more reassuring. Made in ‘06, I guess this is something they don’t make any more, and is surplus stock?

Setup is very simple. I just basically plug everything in. Connect the cable to the “COAX NETWORK” connector, plug the ethernet into the “PC/LAN” port, and connect the power. There’s a switch for host/client, which you don’t have to adjust as it will auto-configure. But I set the one near my router to HOST and the other two to CLIENT.

Results

It works! The boxes need about ten seconds to connect after you power them up, then it seems like I have a very solid 70Mbps (about 8MB/sec) Ethernet connection. I timed the speed by copying large files and observing the percentage used in the Process Monitor’s network window. There seem to be no problems at all.

While this is comparable to the reported peak performance of Wireless-N, it’s vastly faster than Wireless-G, which is what the PS3 uses. I did the same tests with Wireless-G (supposedly 54Mbp/s), and only got 18Mbps (This would not cut it if I were to get 30Mbps FiOS, which Verizon are offering here soon). Coax also does not degraded with distance or interference, so I’m getting the same solid 70 Mbps to the far corners of the house. Wireless seem inherently unreliable, for example, I just plugged in a D-Link wireless-N adapter to my laptop, and the speed DROPPED to 30% of the Wireless-G speed on the same laptop (should have been twice as fast)

I added a switch behind the TV to connect the Xbox 360, PS3, and the Wii, and that seems fine (I still need to get an Ethernet adapter for the Wii).

Overall I’m very happy. I’ve replaced a very unreliable slow wireless network with a fast wired network. I’ll still keep the wireless connected to use with the iPhones and laptops. But for the fixed devices, it’s a vast improvement.

Powerline 200Mbps?

Of course, now I’ve actually got this set up and working, I discover that powerline ethernet adapters actually go up to 200Mbps now, with 400 planned soon. Grrr! Still, reviews are mixed, and it’s not clear if you’d actually get that 200Mbps (and it’s probably 100Mbps on-way, which is the figure that counts), what with the power lines being unshielded, and having 110 Volts running through them. So I’m still pretty happy with what I’ve got.

[EDIT August ]  I’ve seen mixed reviews of the powerline ethernet, anything from barely working (2Mb/s) to very fast (150Mb/s),  so i’m pretty happy to get a solid 70.  I even bought another unit, so I can locate it in the wiring closet if needed, for when the FiOS arrives (which looks like it might not be until September or October)

Some “new “adapters, which I’m thinking really all run of the same chipset (D-Link is apparently Entropic’s EN2210 c.LINK chipset).  I opened up the DPH548, and the chips are:

AD9865BCP 10-Bit Broadband Modem Mixed Signal Front End - the actual PNA interface.
CG3011QI-10 Probably the controller/ASIC type thingy
AM29LV010B - 1 Megabit (128 K x 8-Bit) CMOS 3.0 Volt-only Uniform Sector Flash Memory
88E6060-RCJ - Closest I could find was LinkStreet 88E6063, 7-Port fast Ethernet switch with 801.1Q.

And these are the new adapters

D-Link’s DXN-221 (for a pair) aand DXN-220 (single add-on unit - Soon to be released.  Seems like the same basic thing as the DPH548.

Gefen’s TV-ETH-2-COAX. $178 for a pair.  Only comes in pairs, but looks pretty robust, and has a four port hub at the reciever end.  Claims 200 mbp/s (full duplex, so really 100 mbp/s)

It works great!

My wife and I both like to read. I recently got a Kindle, and Holly just had to have one too. One downside of e-books is that you can’t share a book with a friend. However, if two people can share one Amazon account (at least, just for Kindle purchases) , then they can share all their books between their two Kindle’s.

It works really simply, and really well. When you get the second Kindle, you just register it to the same account as the first one. Then when you buy a book, or download a sample, you get a drop-down box that lets you choose which Kindle you want the book sent to. In the image to the right I’ve selected “Mick’s Kindle”.

So it gets sent to whichever Kindle you like. There’s no option to send it to both Kindles, but once you’ve bought it, then it’s in your “Media Library” on Amazon, and from there you can send it again to either Kindle.

You can also buy books on the Kindle itself, and with that it works just as you would expect - the book goes to the Kindle you ordered it on, and to the Media Library, so it can be downloaded to either Kindle at a later time.

Finally you can also get a copy of the book on the other Kindle without using the computer. Just go to the “Content Manager” on the Kindle’s main menu. In the Content Manager, some books are labeled “Kindle”, meaning they are in your Kindle, and some are labeled “Amazon”, meaning they are just in your Media Store. If Holly buys a book, it will automatically show up here.

So, to download a book Holly just bought on her Kindle, I just select it in the Content Manager, and then select “Move to Kindle Memory” from the Menu. The book will transfer, and twenty seconds later you can start reading.

This all brings me to an unexpected advantage of the Kindle. We can read the same book at the same time. Normally you’d read a book and then lend it to someone. But since we have two Kindles, with two copies of the book (for less than the price of one paper book), we can both be reading it at the same time. We are currently both reading What is the What by Dave Eggers, and it’s a novel experience to be able to discuss the book while were are both still reading it.

I love Amazon’s Kindle.

I’ve had mine for about month now, and I’ve read four books on it so far:

1984 by George Orwell. (314 pages)
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (350 pages)
Sabriel by Garth Nix (496 pages)
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (983 pages)

As a replacement for the paper versions of these books it is nearly flawless, and provides many advantages. The most obvious one being that the weight and space of multiple books is reduced to one slender 10.3 ounce Kindle. On the face of it this might not seem such a great improvement, but really it conveys two huge benefits.

Firstly it means no more shelf space is taken up by books you are never going to read again. We’ve got lots of bookcases in our house, full of books that we read once, perhaps as much as 20 years ago. It’s hard to get rid of books you have an emotional attachment to, but they are just taking up space - a lot of space. Look at how much nine books takes up.

You could of course get rid of your books after you read them, sell them, give them away, or only read books from the library. But one thing you can’t do with a book is make it smaller. Laying in bed reading Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth in hardback, is not a comfortable experience. It’s nearly a thousand pages, and weighs 2.2 pounds. Yet on the Kindle it weighs just the same as any other book. (See World Without End in the image above, same sized book)

Less obvious advantages abound. I read some Luddite suggest the Kindle would not be perfect until it had two screens to simulate the two pages of an open book. That’s just stupid. Two screens would weigh twice as much, would be greatly more prone to breaking at the hinge, and you’d have to shift your reading between the pages. The beauty of the Kindle is that you can read in one position, holding the Kindle in either hand (or both, or neither), and turn pages with an imperceptible press of a button.

People who scoff at this improvement over turning pages manually would probably have scoffed at the invention of the television remote control. “How hard is it to get up and change the channel”, they would laugh. This is a natural response, and it’s only when you’ve actually tried it for a while that you appreciate actually not having to turn pages yourself, and not having to heft a heavy book one way or the other so you can read each page. You appreciate being able to lay in whatever position you like, the Kindle conforming to your comfort, rather than your position being dictated by the weight and form of a traditional book.

Having a built in dictionary might not seem so great either, but I actually used it when reading Pillars of the Earth to look up “unctuous” (location 14409), which I originally took to be something like “uncouth”, and might have misunderstood the tone of the whole section had I not had the dictionary a few clicks away. It’s just very convenient.

The search function is nice as well. You can search all your books in seconds for a particular word or phrase. That’s simply impossible with traditional books.

The books are cheaper. Especially if you look at hardbacks. Look at Follett’s World Without End, which is $35 in the shops, $21+shipping online, and just $10 on the Kindle. It’s not available in paperback yet, but Pillars of the Earth is, and costs $14.97 for the paperback, and just $6.39 for the Kindle version.

The books are cheaper in part because of the obvious low costs of duplication. But another reason is the restrictions that are placed on the digital version. You can’t re-sell the book, or lend it to anyone. Since you don’t get a physical object, the value of what you receive is diminished.

This is not an issue for me. I rarely lend or borrow books. The only person I share books with is my wife, Holly, and this is something we can still do, as we now have two Kindles (Holly’s arrived today).

With two Kindles, you can share books if both Kindles are registered to the same account. This is a minor inconvenience to Holly, as she would have to be logged in as me if she wanted to buy Kindle books on her computer. But buying directly off the Kindle itself is exactly the same.

I also really like being able to download a sample of a book. That way I can read the first chapter and see if I’m going to like it before I buy it. It’s a simple thing, but ultimately could greatly improve the average enjoyment I get out of books, and save a lot of wasted half-read books that I’m only grinding through because I paid for them without reading any of them.

One major advantage is the VAST amount of books that are totally free because they are out of copyright. All you have to do it copy them onto your Kindle, and they read just like any other book. Here’s a list of some of the best free books available, thousands of dollars worth, from some astonishingly good authors:

http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/cgi-bin/category/download-free-mobipocket-ebook-titlesearch

So what are the downsides here?

The most obvious one seems to be the initial cost. $400 is a lot of money, but then again, if I save $10 for every book I buy, then I just need to buy 40 books to have it pay for itself. Certainly within a year or so I’ll be making a profit. In addition, you get all the benefits mentioned above - worth paying extra for, and yet we actually end up saving money. Not to mention the bookcases we don’t have to buy, and all the free books you are getting.

The real problem with the Kindle is the lack of available books. Not that there are not a lot of books; there are currently 110,704 books available on the Kindle. But of those, only 38,357 are fiction, and within that, 2,465 are “Literary Fiction”, which seems to encompass much of what I like to read.

Of course that’s still a lot of books. The problem is there are books I want to read that are not on the Kindle. There’s no Iain M. Banks, and he’s my favorite author, with a new book out in hardback (Matter) that I really want to read. There are others as well, books I’ve seen recommended, but which are not on the Kindle. It’s very annoying to have this wonderful way of reading books, but not all books.

So what to do? Right now I feel like I’ll just read the books that are currently on the Kindle. Eventually the other books will be on there, and I can wait a year of so for that to happen. There is certainly enough reading matter there, and while it rankles somewhat, I can wait. If I really need to read a book, I can buy it in paper - but I don’t think it’s likely.

Other things are mostly minor. The screen is a little gray, and so needs slightly more light to comfortable read than a traditional book. You can’t easily just riffle back a bunch of pages (but it’s easy to go back one page). I sometimes turn pages by accident (but you stop that fairly quickly, and it’s no worse than loosing your page in a traditional book). It’s perhaps a little slow and cumbersome in going through your library, but then you can’t search your bookcases while laying in bed.

The version of 1984 I read had several typos in it. This is obviously because of OCR errors from scanning the book in. This is not going to be an issue with any modern book (none of the other books had similar problems). However, cheap old scanned books might continue to have some errors. This is really a problem with the individual publishers, and will diminish as e-books become more mainstream.

It’s not great for reference books. While searching is great, the small screen, the low resolution, the lack of color, and the slowness of page flipping make it unsuitable for many kinds of reference book. It’s best for the type of book that you read once, from start to end. Those books occupy many feet of my shelf space, and cost me hundreds of dollars.

So the Kindle is great, I love it. It’s only going to get better as well. In three or four years I’ll probably buy a Kindle 2.0, with a crisper, faster screen, maybe color. All my books will transfer over to it and I’ll continue to save space and money, while reading more, and reading better.

Very easy to do, you just need to install two free programs:

1) DVD43: http://www.dvd43.com
(Reboot after installing)

2) Handbrake: http://handbrake.fr/
- More specifically, install the Windows GUI version.

Then:

3) Insert DVD, cancel any auto-play

4) Run Handbrake, under Source, browse to the VIDEO_TS folder on your DVD drive

5) Under Destination, browse to any folder on your PC where the converted video will be stored, pick an appropriate name for the movie.

6) Under Presets, click on iPhone/iPod Touch, do not adjust any other settings.

7) Click Start, and wait 30 minutes to 2+ hours (depending on computer speed, and DVD length)

8) Drag the converted (.mp4 or .mpv) video file into Movies in your iTunes library

9) On the iPhone in iTunes, click the “Video” tab, then select the Movies you want to sync.

10) Sync, done. Movie will show up on your iPhone’s iPod “Videos”.

Tip: When playing, double tap to adjust the zoom in letterboxed movies.

Just got back from Mammoth Mountain, where we had a great three days of Skiing. I liked the skis I rented so much that I actually bought a pair. Now I feel like I’m a real skier!

Holly made this excellent video:

And here are some photos:

http://picasaweb.google.com/mickword/2008MammothWithZT

I must have read this book a thousand times when I was young.  Finally someone scanned it, and stuck it in an online museum:

http://www.pointlessmuseum.com/museum/usbornebookofthefutureindex.php