All posts by alex

WinTV Nova-T USB2 and Vista

Tech

I posted a while back about the troubles I’d been having with my Hauppauge DVB TV card. Hauppuage don’t have any drivers that work with hyperthreaded and dual core CPUs; Vista will blue screen shortly after starting to use the TV card.

The Microsoft supplied drivers that get installed from Windows Update when you plug the card in are reliable but non functional (they tune the channels 1mHz out).

There is a workaround though!

In the registry, search for the string "Hauppauge Nova-USB2-T DVB-T Adapter" under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet.

You should find an entry similar to the screenshot below in the classes.

Under one of the values (mine was 008, but yours could be 007 or similar), there’ll be two subkeys, "Capabilities" and "DriverData".

In "DriverData" create two new DWORDs, with these decimal values:

– TunerRemap = 0
– UseFreqOffsetDVBT = 167

You’ll probably need to restart and may even need to rescan the channels in Media Center (although I didn’t need to).

The drivers do vaguely work, mine suffer from a bit of stutter, crackly audio and don’t survive a sleep. But hey :) One last thing, these instructions only apply to the Microsoft/Windows Update supplied driver. You’ll need to clean off any Hauppuage ones if you’ve installed them.

O2 voicemail improvements

Personal, Tech

O2 have just told me through our corporate provider that they’ve made some changes to the 901 voicemail service. In particular, you can now have the voicemail notification flag set on your phone, rather than a text or phone call.

I remember having this on Orange years back and it was really neat. I’ve just enabled it on both my work and personal phones and it works a treat.

Here’s the full list of updates:

• Time and date after each message: You can choose to have the time and date that your messages were received played after each message
• On-screen voicemail notification: You can choose to be notified with the on-screen Voicemail symbol and screen text when you receive a new message
• Mailbox full notification: You will now be notified with a text when your voicemail box is full
• Simplified call return feature: All you need to do is press 5 and you’ll be connected. (Previously you had to press three keys.)
• Re-record: Callers who are diverted to voicemail will be offered the option to listen to and re-record their message
• Temporary greeting: You can now record a temporary greeting and like email you’ll be asked if you want to switch it off when you access voicemail

Living with Vista – part 2: more niggles

Personal, Random, Tech

I promise I’ll write up some of the good things about Vista at some point, but I have to get the bad stuff out of the way first. These are going to seem a bit nit-picky, but I think they’re pretty symptomatic of what the regular user’s going to experience once they get their mits on Vista at the end of the month. Don’t forget that Vista Ultimate will set you back £250 – for that kind of money I expect it to work.

Firstly, I have a Microsoft keyboard with an integrated fingerprint reader. Not for any sense of security (we all know how rubbish they are), but for convenience – it makes logging on and signing into web sites and email a lot easier. I was pretty pleased to see that Microsoft have a proper release of the "DigitalPersona" software available for download for Vista. Logging on (initially) worked just fine with the reader, however if I locked the screen and then tried to unlock it again by fingerprint, I’d just get an error "invalid username or password" (regular password worked fine). Great.

I could *just* about deal with this, however I started to find that when I was using IE7, it would crash on exit with an error about ntdll.dll and then decide to restart itself. I was trying to close IE in the first place, so I’d quit it and it would crash again, and again, and again… I found some posts where other people had had similar problems, and lo, the problem was caused by MS’s DigitalPersona software. Off to the junk it went and the problems went away.

This is pretty amazing – a Microsoft produced product, running on their flagship OS with one of their premium bits of hardware. And it doesn’t work. What does this say about their quality control and testing?

Next, yet another Microsoft mess. I have a copy of Vista Ultimate (albeit from MSDN, but still not cheap) – I like Media Centre. I love the design, the fancy graphics, the fact it can play and record TV… Perfect! I have a Hauppauge Nova-T USB2 which is touted to have drivers in the box for Vista. I plugged it in, Vista found the drivers and away I went.

I started Media Centre and started scanning for TV channels and it found all the regular ones I’d expect, except I couldn’t watch any of them. Well, apart from some shitty shopping channels which might as well be nothing. I couldn’t understand – with digital TV, if it finds the name of the channel during the scan you can be pretty sure it’ll be able to view it. I ran up TV on an XP box and it worked fine, so I doubted it was the aerial.

It transpires that the Microsoft supplied drivers tune themselves to the wrong frequency – it’s only off by 1mHz, but it’s enough to make it unusable. The beta drivers from Hauppauge themselves cause Vista to bluescreen too… You can’t blame Microsoft for Hauppauge’s rubbish betas, but you can blame them for shipping wonky drivers in the first place.

If I’m an average user, I’m going to expect things to "just work". When I plug something in and it appears to work but then later transpires not to, I’m going to be pretty pissed. I’m not going to want to be trawling dodgy hardware manufacturer’s forums in the vain hope of finding some broken beta driver from a slow FTP site that turns out to make my lovely new Vista PC more unstable than Windows ME!

Don’t even get me started on the shocking state of Vista technical documentation. Even if it does exist, it’s poorly written, wrong or just plain contradictory. Want to phone them up and get help? Well, you can’t because Vista "isn’t released yet", not even if you throw money at them (which currently stands at £200 per incident).

Well, I suppose it’s no worse than open source ;)

Next time – some good things to say!

Case modding

Personal, Random, Tech

It’s pretty weird and to some it will be a complete waste of time: I present my SGI O2 case mod – I’ve stuffed a Core 2 Duo Vista machine inside the case of a mid-90s vintage workstation.

As it’s quite a major undertaking, I’ve written up its own dedicated page.

Gallery updated

Personal, Photography, Tech

I’ve switched to using Gallery2 instead of Coppermine for my gallery software – it’s a lot easier to create custom themes and to upload items. I think I’ve updated all the pictures used in the blog, but there’ll still be external links that point to the wrong place…

Let me know if you think anything’s broken or you can’t find what you’re looking for!

Living with Vista – part I: power management

Personal, Tech

I’ve been running Vista in various locations at home & work for a few months now and I though it was time to write about my experiences.

Part of my day job recently has been looking at power saving, and putting machines to sleep (S3 standby) after a certain period of inactivity. In Windows XP this has been pretty unreliable mostly due to the ability of applications to veto the power broadcast message and hold up sleep.

Vista was supposed to change all this. Not only were drivers supposed to be more robust but applications only have a 2 second limit to respond to an impeding sleep request before Windows is yanked out beneath them. There is now also "hybrid sleep" (a mix of S3/S4) that is supposed to protect your data even if things do all go horribly wrong.

However, all is not well in the fantasy land of Vista sleep. At work I have a number of machines that work well (HP 7600, 7700 and tc4400). They go to sleep when they’re supposed to, they wake up when you ask them to and everything works once they’re back up and running.

At home I have one rather special homebuilt machine (I’ll be posting about it soon) and a HP tc4200 and neither are very happy with sleep. First, the tc4200: it’s a minor point but the wireless card refuses to work after S3 sleep. Only a reboot will fix it.

My homebuilt machine is a disaster zone when it comes to sleeping. It’s basically a Core 2 Duo built on a Gigabyte GA-965GM-S2 (which is really just an Intel chipset). No extra video cards, no peripherals… nothing fancy. When it sleeps, it spends about 10 minutes thrashing the hard disk (WDC WD2500KS SATAII) before restarting itself. Windows then refuses to start and only a quick trip into safe mode fixes it.

After several hours fiddling with power management settings, I now finally have it vaguely sleeping reliably. If you have problems with Vista sleep, try some (or all) of the following:

– Disable "allow USB devices to wake PC" (or similar wording) in the BIOS.

– In Vista device manager, go into the properties of your USB keyboard and mouse (don’t bother if you have PS2 ones) and in the power management tab uncheck the option to "Allow this device to wake the computer".

– Go into the "Power Options" control panel and create a new power profile. Once it’s setup click on "change plan settings" then "change advanced power settings". In here change the following:
1. Sleep > Allow Hybrid Sleep > OFF
2. USB settings > USB selective suspend settings > DISABLED

For me, at any rate, my machine now sleeps ok. When it resumes there are some niggles though: the NIC won’t pick up a DHCP lease (so now I have to set it to static), the numlock state isn’t remembered, it throws an error about an unrecognised USB device (when there isn’t once plugged in) and the fingerprint reader won’t unlock my session.

But hey, it sleeps :)

I still have some thoughts on the good and bad of living with Vista and I’ll post them up in the new few days – along with a surprise!

Squeaky Nano

Tech

Apparently some people have reported that their 2G iPod Nanos make a high pitched noise when they’re in use…

 I have to admit that I hadn’t really noticed, but if I put my ear to mine (8GB black) then I can just about hear it, and I have pretty sensitive ears to squealing noises!

I suspect it’s probably the inverter for the backlight as it stops making a noise when the screen lighting goes off.

Meh :)

Blog update

Personal, Tech

It’s been a right pain in the **** but I’ve got Movable Type 3.3 installed and with it a few new features like the "tag cloud". I just wish there was a way to assign MT tags using Microsoft Live Writer, then I’d never have to touch the web interface…

Nike+ disassembled

Personal, Photography, Random, Tech

This is very sad , but what else can you do when your Nike+iPod running sensor goes flat and you can’t change the battery?

I had to take a Dremel to it to get it open…

Only after the event did I find a page with a technical writeup (if you’re into that sort of thing).

I am still pretty annoyed that you have to spend £20 a year on replacing the thing. How hard could it have been to build in a watertight battery compartment?