Life is good
Remember last week when I was ranting about nothing working as it should?
Well - this weeks feels a lot more successful than the last one. It may very well be one of the nicest weeks I've had in IT so far.
- The plugin system I've written for our PopScan Windows Client doesn't just work, it's also some of the shiniest code I've written in my life. Everything is completely transparent and thus easy to debug and extend. Once more, simplicity lead to consistency and consistency is what I'm striving for.
- Yesterday, we finally managed to kill a long standing bug in a certain PopScan installation which seemed to manifest itself in intermittently non-working synchronization but was apparently not at all working synchronization. Now it works consistently.
- Over the weekend, I finally got off my ass and used some knowledge in physics and and a water-level to re-balance my projector on the ceiling mount making the picture fit the screen perfectly.
- Just now, I've configured two managed switches at home to carry cable modem traffic over a separate VLAN allowing me to abandon my previously whacky setup wasting a lot of cable and looking really bad. I was forced to do that because a TV connector I've had mounted stopped working consistently (here's the word again).
The configuration I thought out worked instantly and internet downtime at home (as if somebody counts) was 20 seconds or so - the TCP connections even stayed all up.
- I finally got mt-daapd to work consistently with all the umlauts in the file names of my iTunes collection.
If this week is an indication of how the rest of the year will be, then I'm really looking forward to this.
As the title says: Life is good.
Bugs, Bugs and more Bugs
I love my job. Ever loved it, always will love it.
But if you ask me what the most annoying aspect of it is, then I would answer you that it's stuff always breaking all around me.
Whatever I do, there is no guarantee that any defined thing will work like it's expected to, it will break from one moment to another or it will never work. There are hardware failures, OS failures, software failures - each and every day I lose at least one or two hours due to stuff not working or suddenly stopping to work.
Let me give you an account of what happened since the beginning of 2009:
- When installing two previously configured servers at a collocation center, one didn't start up at all (opening and reclosing the case fixed that) and the ESX server on the other machine refused to connect to the VMWare license server despite a working TCP/IP connection between them which turned out to be a missing host file entry despite connecting via IP-address.
- One day later, Outlook on a computer of someone I'm looking after the PC a bit decided to trash the .PST-file and I had to remotely guide (on the phone) the person to restore it from the backup.
- Yesterday, my Firebug suddenly stopped working. At least the console-object wasn't any longer available in my scripts and the console itself didn't work. Reinstalling the Addon helped (WTF?)
- One of my two Vista Media Center PCs suddenly stopped to play any video file, despite me not doing updates on these machines to prevent stuff like this from happening. To this date I have no idea how to fix this.
- My Delphi 2007 installation just now decided to stop displaying the online help. Trying to fix that by reinstalling it ended with an Error message containing title and content of "Error", but not after first completely uninstalling Delphi with no way of getting it back (you know... "Error" again). This was fixed by removing D2009 and then reinstalling 2007 and 2009 - a process that took 2 hours of installation time and another three to figure out what's going on.
- When I was frustrated enough and wanted to vent (i.e. write this post), my WordPress just now decided to do something really strange to the layout of the "Add New Post" page which made it impossible to post anything. Disabling Google Gears and restarting the browser helped.
Our everyday technology is becoming more and more complex, thus causing more and more strange problems, requiring more and more knowledge and time to work around them. If we continue on that path, sooner or later it will be impossible to keep up with fixing problems popping up.
That will be the day when I'll hopefully live on some island way off the net and all this stuff.
Sonos news
Today, Sonos announced their new 2.7 software version for their home appliances with some additional web radio features in which I'm not particularly interested as I'm more or less only listening to one web radio station. What they've also announced though was much more interesting: An iPhone Version of their Controller application (iTunes Link).
The thing doesn't just look nice, it also works perfectly well and provides all the functionality you are used to have in your sonos controller, but without the controllers bulkyness (the thing is heavy and quite large). I'm constantly carrying my iPhone around anyways and it's constantly connected to the WiFi network in my home, so it's the perfect fit to be a sonos controller.
The application starts up quite instantly: It does show a splash screen for around three seconds, but that is still way shorter than a controller booting up from deep sleep, which you have to put it into if you want it to last longer than a day or so.
Functionality-wise the iPhone application provides everything a real controller does - well... nearly everything. I truly miss the alarm functionality, but I'm quite sure that'll come soon enough.
Aside of that, I'm inclined to say that this little application more or less obsoletes the original controller. And in every case but the 32GB iPod Touch, it's always cheaper to buy any Apple device and install the application than it is to buy the original Sonos controller (here in Switzerland, you can get an 8 GB touch for half the price of a Sonos controller) - if you can live with setting up alarms in the desktop software. It's certainly possible (and thankfully much quicker than with the original controller) to cancel a running alarm in the iPhone controller.
Very nice indeed.
On related news: I have updated my ogg to mp3 stream converter to stop looking at the url to decide whether the url to play is a stream itself or a playlist, but instead to fetch the information from the HTTP response header themselves, thus making the script to continue to work with Rainwave despite them having changed the URL for the tune in link.
What sucks about the Touch Diamond
Contrary to all thinking and common-sense I've displayed in my «Which phone for me?»-post, I went and bought the Touch Diamond. The perspective of having a hackable device with high resolution, GPS and voip capability and flawlessly working Exchange-Synchronization finally pushed me over - oh and of course I just like new gadgets to try out.
In my dream world, the Touch would even replace my iPod Touch as a video player and bathtub browser, so I could go back to my old Nano for podcasts.
Unfortunately, the Touch is not much more than any other Windows Mobile phone with all the suckage and half-working features they usually come with. Here's the list:
- VoIP is a no-go. The firmware of the Touch is crippled and does not provide Windows Mobile 6+ SIP support, Skype doesn't run on Windows Mobile 6.1, but all that doesn't matter anway because none of the Voip-Solutions actually use the speakerphone. You can only get VoIP sound on the amplified speaker on the back of the phone - or you use a headset at which time, the thing isn't better than any other VoIP solution at my disposal.
- GPS is a no go as the Diamond takes *ages* to find a signal and it's really fiddly to get it to work - even just in the integrated Google maps application.
- Typing anything is really hard despite HTC really trying. Whichever input method you chose, you lose: The Windows Mobile native solutions only work with the pen and the HTC keypads are too large for the applications to remain really usable. Writing SMSes takes me so much longer than every other smart phone I've tried before.
- T9 is a nice idea, but here and then, you need to enter some special chars. Like dots. Too bad that they are hidden behind another menu - especially the dot.
- This TouchFLO 3D-thingie sounds nice on the web and in all the demonstrations, but it sucks anway, mainly because it's slow as hell. The iPhone interface doesn't just look good, it's also responsive, which is where HTC fails. Writing an SMS message takes *minutes* when you combine the embarrassingly slow loading time of the SMS app with the incredibly fiddly text input system.
- You only get a German T9 with the German version of the Firmware which has probably been translated using Google Translation or Babelfish.
- The worst idea ever from a consumer perspective was that stupid ExtUSB connector. Aside of the fact that you'd practically have to buy an extra cable to sync from home and the office, you also need another extra cable if you want to plug in decent headphones. The ones coming with the device are unusable and it's impossible to plug better ones. Also, the needed adapter cable is currently not available to buy anywhere I looked.
- The screen, while having a nice DPI count is too small to be usable for earnest web browsing. Why does windows mobile have to paint everything four times as large when there are four times as many pixels available?
- Finger gestures just don't work on a touch sensitive display, no matter how much they try. At least they don't work once you are used to the responsiveness and accuracy of an iPhone (or iPod touch).
- The built-in opera browser, while looking nice and providing a much better page zoom feature than the iPod Touch also is unusable because it's much too slow.
So instead of having a possible iPhone killer in my pocket, I have a phone that provides around zero more actually usable functionality than my previous W880i and yet is much slower, crashier, larger and heavier than the old solution.
Here's the old feature comparison table listing the features I tought the touch would have as opposed to the features the touch actually has:
| assumed | actually | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Phone usage | |||
| Quick dialing of arbitrary numbers | (the phone application takes around 20 seconds to load, the buttons are totally unresponsive) | ||
| Acceptable battery life (more than two days) | ? | yes. Actually yes. 4 days is not bad. | |
| usable as modem | yes | yes | |
| usable while not looking at the device | limited | not at all mainly because of the laggyness of the interface | |
| quick writing of SMS messages | it's much, much worse than anticipated. | ||
| Sending and receiving of MMS messages | yes | not really. Sending pictures is annoying as hell and everything is terribly slow. | |
| PIM usage | |||
| synchronizes with google calendar/contacts | |||
| synchronizes with Outlook | yes | yes | |
| usable calendar | yes | very, very slow | |
| usable todo list | yes | slow | |
| media player usage | |||
| integrates into current iTunes based podcast workflow | |||
| straight forward audio playing interface | |||
| straight forward video playing interface | |||
| acceptable video player | yes | no. No sound due to no way to plug my own headphones. | |
| hackability | |||
| ssh client | yes | not really. putty doesn't quite work right on VGA Winmob 6.1 | |
| skype client | yes | no. a) it doesn't work and b) it would require headset usage as skype is unable to use the speakerphone. | |
| OperaMini (browser usable on GSM) | yes | limited. No softkeys and touch-buttons too small to reliably hit. | |
| WLAN-Browser | yes | no. Too slow, Screen real estate too limited. | |
Now tell me how this could be called progress.
I'm giving this thing until the end of the week. Maybe I get used to its deficiencies in the matters of interface speed. If not, it's gone. As is the prospective of me buying any other Windows Mobile phone. Ever.
Sorry for the rant, but it had to be.
Which phone for me?
I'm a quite happy user of my Sony Ericsson W880i / iPod Touch combo: The touch is for listening to podcasts and watching video, the W880i is for SMSing and making a phone call here and then, though it's mostly for getting called these days. Skype exists and works well.
Now with all the new toysinteresting devices coming out all over the place, maybe it's time to reevaluate the different options. 3G iPhone? Something Windows Mobile based (though the touch diamond seems to be the way to go)? My old phone? Or a combination of any of them?
I tried to make a tabular comparison, where I'm listing the phones by use cases. And I'm only listening features interesting for me. Your points may differ from the ones presented here. This is, after all, a guide I used to pick a solution.
| iPhone | Touch Diamond | W880i | |
| Phone usage | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Quick dialing of arbitrary numbers | yes | ||
| Acceptable battery life (more than two days) | ? | ? | yes |
| usable as modem | probably not | yes | yes |
| usable while not looking at the device | limited | yes | |
| quick writing of SMS messages | yes | ||
| Sending and receiving of MMS messages1 | yes | yes | |
| PIM usage | |||
| synchronizes with google calendar/contacts2 | maybe | yes. Contacts limited | |
| synchronizes with Outlook | maybe | yes | not reliably |
| usable calendar | yes | yes | |
| usable todo list | yes | ||
| media player usage | |||
| integrates into current iTunes based podcast workflow3 | yes | ||
| straight forward audio playing interface | yes | ||
| straight forward video playing interface4 | |||
| acceptable video player5 | limited | yes | |
| hackability | |||
| ssh client | maybe | yes | |
| skype client6 | maybe | yes | |
| OperaMini (browser usable on GSM) | yes | yes | |
| WLAN-Browser | yes | yes | |
Notes:
- While I'm not using it often, here and then I come across something funny which I want to share with my parents or my girlfriend. MMS is the optimal medium for that. I send about one MMS per two months and I receive around 2 MMS per month, so this is probably not as important.
- Using Services like GooSync it is possible to synchronize the W880i with the Google services, though Google's Contact API currently isn't in a state where it would be useful for actually using it to synchronize contacts with the pone - mainly due to not providing an option to synchronize only certain matching contacts.
- iTunes not only downloads Podcasts but also keeps track of playback position and the new/not new state across devices and computers. I'm subscribed to more than 20 podcasts, so such features are essential for me.
- Neither the iPhone nor the WinMob devices provide an user experience for playing video that even comes close to match the one the iPhone would provide for Audio files.
- The Video player on the iPhone is limited to MP4-packaged H.264 files, whereas there are Media Players for WinMob that can handle whatever you throw at them.
- Skype is available as a JavaME application, but in addition to the (horrendous) GPRS charge, Skype also charges you, whether you make or receive calls. This is why I listed skype support as missing on the W880i
What's missing in the comparison table is one of the upcoming large Windows Mobile devices with built-in keyboards like the Sony Ericcson XPERIA or the Touch Diamond pro. This class of devices does provide more convenient typing, but their usability still doesn't even come close to matching a pure phones one. You'd still have to browse through menus, search special keys (like umlauts) and stuff. It's just that typing has become a bit easier.
These little usability benefits do not even come close to offset the weight and especially thickness of these devices which is why I'm not listening them in the table above.
But let's discuss the tables content for now:
First the obvious: The best phone in the list is... well... the phone. Neither of the two smart phones is capable of bringing a pure phone user experience that comes even close to what a real phone with a real keyboard can provide.
In case you wonder: I'm a heavy user of T9. Typing with a 10-key keypad assisted by T9 feels completely natural to me and the W880i provides really nice T9 functionality with quick access to suggestions and other shortcuts, so I'm actually inclined to say that I'm quicker to type on that phone than I would even be with one of the larger keyboard-based smart phones, mainly due to shorter distances to travel with the finger(s). With my ~100 SMS per month, I consider myself to be a heavy user of SMS, so quick and easy SMS writing and reception is a key feature for me.
Aside of that, the phone is more or less just that: A phone. It doesn't really shine in every other aspect. Music kind-of works, but is unusable for Podcasts due to not saving playback position between launches of the media application, let alone synchronizing the playback position across devices.
Video, applications and even just browsing beyond the means of what OperaMini can provide are out of the question.
As such, the W880i basically is like grep. Or sort. Or uniq. Or like any other of these little UNIX utilities: It does one thing and it does it well.
The WinMob phones provide not much better media support (they do play video, but for Podcasts they are still not as good as iTunes), but they shine in the realm of hackability and, of course, the PIM synchronization, though there they more or less only work with Exchange. Also, the larger screen provides the user with a lot more possibilities UI-wise.
So while the W880i is the better phone, the WinMob devices are the better PIM solution and better platform to hack on which appeals the geek in me quite more - obviously.
The iPhone is limited in its capabilities as a phone, provides next to no hackability and will probably come with some enforced phone contract here in Switzerland. It does shine in the media department though, but that part is also perfectly well handled by my current iPod Touch to which I can easily (at the cost of $10) add the limited hackability the iPhone is going to get - should I need it.
Looking at this, the iPhone certainly looks like an uninteresting solution: All it would provide I currently have in the touch, aside of the phone, for which I currently have a better solution anyways.
Replacing the W880i/touch combo with either an iPhone or a WinMob solution seems like a stupid thing to do as I'd lose the good usability of the phone and/or the nice Media capabilities of the touch.
So in the end, I have only a couple of options which would work for me:
- Replace my W880i/touch combo with a W880i/iPhone combo and use the iPhone as an always-connected surf station with limited hackability. This, frankly, is just too expensive to be of any value as it would mean to get a second mobile contract just for surfing here and then, while still forcing me to keep the data option for my W880i because the iPhone is not usable as a modem in case I need to emergency-repair a server or something.
- Replace the W880i in my combo with the Touch Diamond: With every earlier model of WinMob devices, this would have been completely un-doable due to the thickness of the devices. The Diamond is not much thicker than the W880i, so the Diamond and the iPod Touch would still fit the same pocket in my trousers. I would lose the kick-ass usability of the W880i, but I would gain a real in-bed media player (without transcoding), an emergency SSH client and a completely working PIM with totally working synchronization.
- Keep my solution as it currently is, while keeping in mind that ever since I got the touch, it provides all the features I would ever need: A kick-ass phone, an acceptable video player, a kick-ass music player and two browsers - one for each type of usage: The OperaMini when I'm forced to use the slow GSM and Safari on the Touch when I have WLAN (you would not want to use Safari over GSM - I tried).
It's funny: I'm so much in love with technology and gadgets. I'm always on the lookout for new stuff, always trying out new, so called revolutionary technology. I've tried to many phone solutions in my life (just look at this blog), but I finally think that I have found a solution I'm willing to stick with.
The current W880i/Touch combo works so well that I don't see any other solution that would only provide me with advantages. Each and every other new device comes with inherent drawbacks.
I guess, for once, I pass. I'll stick around with my outdated solution and I'll wait for the next revolution. What I currently have just works too well.
Apple TV – Second try
When Apple announced their AppleTV a couple of months (or was it years?) ago, I was very skeptical of the general idea behind the device. Think of it: What was the big success behind the iPod? That it could run proprietary AAC files people buy from the music store?
No. That thing didn't even exist back then. The reason for the success was the total easy (and FAST - remember: Back in the days, we had 1.1 MB/s USB which every MP3 player used vs. 40MB/s Firewire of the iPod) handling and the fact that it was an MP3 player - playing the files everyone already had.
It was a device for playing the content that was available at the time.
The AppleTV in its first incarnation was a device capable of playing content that wasn't exactly available. Sure it could play the two video podcasts that existed back then (maybe more, but you get the point). And you could buy TV shows and movies in subpar quality on your PC (Windows or Mac) and then transfer them to the device. But the content that was available back then was in a different format: XVID dominated the scene. x264 was a newcomer and MP4 (and mov) wasn't exactly used.
So what you got was a device, but no content (and the compatible content you had was in subpar quality compared to the incompatible content that was available). And you needed a PC, so it wasn't exactly a device I could hook to my parents PC for example.
All these things were fixed by Apple today:
- There is a huge library of content available right here, right now (at least in the US): The new movie rental service. Granted. I think it's not quite there yet price vs. usability-wise (I think $5 is a totally acceptable price for a movie with unlimited replayability), but at least we have the content.
- It works without a PC. I can hook this thing up to my parents TV and they can immediately use it.
- The quality is OK. Actually, it's more than OK. There is HD content available (though maybe only 720p one, but frankly, on my expensive 1080p projector, I don't see that much of a difference between 720p and 1080p)
- It can still access the scarce content that was available before.
The fact that this provides very easy to use video-on-demand to a huge amount of people is what makes me think that this little device is even more of a disruptive technology than the iPod or the iPhone. Think of it: Countless of companies are trying to make people pay for content these days. It's the telcos, it's cable companies and it's device manufacturers. But what do we get? Crappy, constantly crashing devices, which are way too complicated for a non-geek and way too limited in functionality for a geek.
Now we got something that's perfect for the non-geek. It has the content. It has the ease-of-use. Plug it in, watch your movie. Done. This is what a whole industry tried to do and failed so miserably.
I for my part will still prefer the flexibility given by my custom Windows Media Center solution. I will still prefer the openness provided by illegal copies of movies. I totally refuse to pay multiple times for something just because someone says that I have to. But that's me.
And even I may sooner or later prefer the comfort of select-now-watch-now to the current procedure (log into private tracker, download torrent, wait for download to finish, watch - torrents are not streamable, even if the bandwith would easily suffice in my case - the packets arrive out of order), so even for me, the AppleTV could be interesting.
This was yet another perfect move by Apple. Ignore the analysts out there who expected more out of this latest keynote. Ignore the bad reception of the keynote by the marked (I hear that Apple stock just dropped a little bit). Ignore all that and listen to yourself: This wonderful device will certainly revolutionize the way we consume video content.
I'm writing this as a constant sceptic - as a person always trying to see a flaw in a certain device. But I'm sure that this time around, they really got it. Nice work!
shion died
After so many years of continued usage, shion (not the character from Xenosaga, my Mac Mini) died.
The few times it's actually capable of detecting its hard-drive at boot-time, it loses contact to it shortly after loading the kernel. And the hard drive makes an awful kind of noise which is a very good pointer at what's wrong.
Now, I could probably just replace the hard drive, but that old G4 processor, the 512 Megs of RAM and the two single USB-ports forcing me to cascade hub after hub all are good reasons to upgrade the hardware itself.
And thus, Shion 2.0 was born.
I grabbed an unused Mac Mini from the office and tried installing Ubuntu Gutsy on it, which worked well, but Leopard's "Startup Disk" preference pane didn't list the partition I installed Ubuntu on as a bootable partition. Booting Linux via pressing alt during pre-boot worked, but, hey, it's a server and I don't have a keyboard ready where shion is going to stand.
So I did it the brute-force way and just installed Ubuntu using the whole drive. It takes a hell of a lot of time for the EFI firmware to start missing the original GUID partition scheme and the original EFI parition, but when it does, it starts GRUB in the MBR partition, so I'm fine.
This does mean that I will be unable to install later firmware upgrades (due to the lack of a working OS X), but at least it means that I can reboot shion when needed without having to grab a keyboard.
This, provided that Domi will be able to solder me a display adaptor making the EFI BIOS emulation think that a display is connected.
All in all, I'm not totally happy with the next generation of shion. Not booting without a display attached, long boot times, non-working bios updates and, especially, no eSATA, but it's free, so I'll take it. I guess the old shion just chose a terribly inconvenient time to die.
The new iPods
So we have new iPods.
Richard sent me an email asking which model he should buy which made me begin thinking whether to upgrade myself. Especially the new touch screen model seemed compelling to me - at first.
Still: I was unable to answer that email with a real recommendation (though honestly, I don't think it was as much about getting a recommendation than about to letting me know that the models were released and to hear my comments about them) and still I don't really know what to think.
First off: This is a matter of taste, but I hate the new nano design: The screen still is too small to be useful for real video consumption, but it made the device very wide - too wide, I think, to be able to comfortably keep it in my trousers pockets while biking (I may be wrong though).
Also, I don't like the rounded corners very much and the new interface... really... why shrink the menu to half a screen and clutter the rest with some meaningless cover art which only the smallest minority of my files are tagged with.
Coverflow feels tucked onto the great old interface and looses a lot of its coolness without the touch screen.
They don't provide any advantage in flash size compared to the older nano models and I think the scroll wheel is way too small compared to the large middle button.
All in all, I would never ever upgrade my second generation nano to one of the third generation as they provide no advantage, look (much) worse (IMHO) and seem to have a usability problem (too small a scroll wheel)
The iPod classic isn't interesting for me: Old style hard drives are heavy and fragile and ever since I bought that 4GB nano a long while ago, I noticed that there is no real reason behind having all the music on the device.
I'm using my nano way more often than I ever used my old iPod: The nano is lighter and I began listening to podcasts. Still: While I lost HD-based iPods around every year and a half due to faulty hard drives or hard drive connectors, my nano still works as well as it did on the first day.
Additionally, the iPod classic shares the strange half-full-screen menu and it's only available in black or white. Nope. Not interesting. At least for me.
The iPod touch is interesting because it has a really interesting user interface. But even there I have my doubts: For one, it's basically an iPhone without the phone. Will I buy an iPhone when (if) it becomes available in Switzerland? If yes, there's no need to buy the iPod Touch. If no, there still remains that awful usability problem of touch-screen only devices:
You can't use them without taking them out of your pocket.
On my nano, I can play and pause the music (or more often podcast) and I can adjust the volume and I can always see what's on the screen.
On the touch interface, I have to put the screen to standby mode, I can't do anything without looking at the device and I think it may be a bit bulky all in all.
The touch is the perfect bathtub surfing device. It's the perfect device to surf the web right before or after going to sleep. But it's not portable.
Sure. I can take it with me, but it fails in all the aspects of portability. It's bulky, it can't be used without taking it out of your pocket and stopping whatever you are doing, it requires two hands to use (so no changing tracks on the bike any more) and it's totally useless until you manually turn the display back on and unlock it (which also requires two hands to do).
So: Which device should Richard buy? I still don't know. What I know is that I will not be replacing my second generation Nano as long as it keeps working.
The Nano looks awesome, works like a charm and is totally portable. Sure. It can't play video, but next to none of my videos actually fits the requirement of the video functionality anyways and I don't see myself recoding already compressed content. That just takes an awful lot of time, greatly degrades the quality and generally is not at all worth the effort.
Careful when clean-installing TabletPCs
At work, I got my hands on a LS-800 TabletPC by motion computing and after spending a lot of time with it and as I'm very interested in TabletPCs anyways, I finally got myself its bigger brother, the LE-1700
The device is a joy to work with: Relatively small and light, one big display and generally nice to handle.
The tablet came with Windows XP preinstalled and naturally, I wanted to have a look at the new Tablet-centric features in Vista, so I went ahead and upgraded.
Or better: Clean-installed.
The initial XP installation was german and I was installing an english copy of Vista which makes the clean installation mandatory.
The LE-1700 is one of the few devices without official Vista-support, but I guess that's because of the missing software for the integrated UMTS modem - for all other devices, drivers either come prebundled with Vista, are available on Windows update or you can use the XP drivers provided at the Motion computing support site.
After the clean installation, I noticed that the calibration of the pen was a bit off - depending on the position on the screen, the tablet noticed the pen up to 5mm left or above the actual position of the pen. Unfortunately, using the calibration utility in the control panel didn't seem to help much.
After some googling, I found out what's going on:
The end-user accessible calibration tool only calibrates the screen for the tilt of the pen relative to the current position. The calibration of the pens position is done by the device manufacturer and there is no tool available for end-users to do that.
Which, by the way, is understandable considering how the miscalibration showed itself: To the middle of the screen it was perfect and near the sides it got worse and worse. This means that a tool would have to present quite a lot of points for you to hit to actually get a accurately working calibration.
Of course, this was a problem for me - especially when I tried out journal and had to notice that the error was bad enough to take all the fun out of hand-writing (imagine writing on a paper and the text appearing .5cm left of where you put the pen).
I needed to get the calibration data and I needed to put it back after the clean installation.
It turns out that the linear calibration data is stored in the registry under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TabletPC\LinearityData in the form of a (large) binary blob.
Unfortunately, Motion does not provide a tool or even reg-file to quickly re-add the data should you clean-install your device, so I had to do the unthinkable (I probably could have called support, but my method had the side effect of not making me wait forever for a fix):
I restored the device to the factory state (by using the preinstalled Acronis True Image residing on a hidden partition), exported the registry settings, reinstalled Vista (at which time the calibration error resurfaced), imported the .reg-File and rebooted.
This solved the problem - the calibration was as smooth as ever.
Now, I'm not sure if the calibration data is valid for the whole series or even defined per device, but here is my calibration data in case you have the same problem as I had.
If the settings are per device or you have a non-LE-1700, I strongly advise you to export that registry key before clean-installing
Obviously I would have loved to know this beforehand, but... oh well.
Wii in a home cinema
The day before yesterday I was lucky enough to get myself a Wii.
It was and basically still is impossible to get one here in Switzerland since the launch on December 8th. So I was very happy that I got the last device of a delivery of like 15 pieces to a game shop near where I work.
Unfortunately, my out-of-the-box experience with the Wii was quite poor which is why I didn't write the review yesterday - I wanted to spend a bit more time with the console before writing something bad about it.
Here's my story:
I'm using a projector, a receiver and a big screen - a real home cinema.
This means that the Wii is usually placed quite far away from either the screen or from the receiver (and especially from the projector about 25 meters in my case). This also means that I get into large issues with the relatively short cable with which you are supposed to connect the sensor bar to the Wii.
And the short A/V-cable didn't help either, so I also couldn't just place the Wii near the screen because then I wouldn't be able to connect it to the receiver.
I ended up placing the Wii more or less in the middle of the room and while I like the looks of the console, it still doesn't fit the clean look of the rest of my home cinema.
It gets worse though: I placed the sensor bar on the top of my center speaker right below the screen. It turned out though that this placement was too far below my usual line of sight so that the Wiimote wasn't able to pick the signal up.
So currently, I have placed the sensor bar on top of an awful looking brown box right on the middle of my table - a setup I have to rebuild whenever I want to play and to put away when I'm not playing.
I SO want that wireless sensor bar to place it on the top of my screen.
But the not-quite-working goes on: At first I wasn't able to connect to my WLAN. The Wii just didn't find the network. Flashing the ZyXEL AP with a newer software helped there and the Wii recognized the network, but was unable to get an IP address.
Due to the awkward placement it was unable to get a strong signal.
I moved the device more to the middle of the room (making it even more visible to the casual eye) and it was finally able to connect.
My first visit to the shopping channel ended up with the whole console crashing hard. Not even the power button worked - I had to unplug and replug it at which time I had enough and just played Zelda (a review of that jewel will probably follow).
Yesterday I was luckier with the shopping channel (I didn't buy anything though) and as I had my terrible "sensor bar on a box" configuration already up and running, I got a glimpse of what the Wii out-of-the-box-experience could be: Smootly working, good-looking and a very nice user control interface - using the Wiimote to point at the screen feels so ... natural.
In my opinion, Nintendo did an awful mistake of forcing that cable on the sensor bar. As we know by now, the bar contains nothing more than two IR-LEDs. The cable is only for powering them. Imagine the sensor bar being another BT device - maybe mains-powered or battery-powered otherwise (though these IR-LEDs suck power like mad). Imagine the console being able to turn it on and off wirelessly.
The whole thing would not have been that much more expensive (alternatively, they could sell it as an addon) but it would allow the same awesome out-of-the-box experience for all users - even the one with a real home entertainment system.
If it wasn't Nintendo (I admit that I am a «fanboi» in matters of Nintendo - the conditioning I got with the NES in my childhood still hasn't worn off), I would have been so incredibly pissed at that first evening that I would have returned the whole console and written one bad review here - even the XBox 360 worked better than the Wii... *sigh*
And all that to save a couple of hours in the engineering department.
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