Distant Parts

Just before Christmas I decided to upgrade my home cinema setup, starting with a 1080p LCD TV (to replace my old 43 inch Pioneer Plasma).

This Goodmans set looked like a bit of a bargain. I managed to get it from LX Direct for about £1040, once various discounts had been taken into account. Not bad for a 42 inch 1080p set, and initially I was pretty impressed.

Good points:

• It wasn’t bad looking, and the build quality was OK for the price
• The surround was black, which I much prefer over silver (less reflections)
• It seemed to handle standard definition feeds quite nicely
• It was happy to accept 1080p at 60hz over DVI with no overscan (nice with my Mac mini)
• 1080p over VGA from the Xbox 360 was handled very well
• Colours and blacks were quite good
• No dead or stuck pixels

As I explored further (and followed the relevant thread on AVForums), the following problems became apparent:

• The volume of the sound went very high (useful), but the increments were too far apart
• There was a buzzing and crackling noise from the backlight (changing the backlight level affected the noise), which could be clearly heard across my living room
• The set had “vertical banding” that could be seen on TV footage with significant horizontal panning
• The optimum viewing angle was quite narrow
• The RGB SCART sockets weren’t RGB, although to be fair, the TV handled composite signals very well
• The DVI and HDMI ports seemed rather picky about resolutions and refresh rates (especially the HDMI). If you’re not too bothered about overscan (on HDMI) or forcing 50Hz vs 60Hz, it wouldn’t be an issue, but I’m picky about these things
• No builtin Freeview, although I have to admit that this wasn’t really a big issue for me

To cut a long story short, I gave up on the Goodmans, and decided to try out a different set.

I managed to get a Nintendo Wii when it was launched in the UK a couple of weeks ago. I’ll probably post about it when I’ve had more chance to play with it, but I wanted to do a quick post on the Wii Internet Channel (basically a version of the Opera web browser) that was released today.

On first impressions, I’m very impressed. It renders Carsurvey.org very well, has reasonably useful zooming, and works beautifully with the Wii Remote (the vibration as you move your cursor over a link is great).

However, I’m beating round the bush here. All that matters is that YouTube works, including full screen playback. For some people, a small wireless device like the Wii, which shows photos and plays YouTube videos on their TV, will be well worth buying, regardless of the fact that it also plays games.

I spend an awful lot of my life online (too much if I’m honest), so having a reliable ADSL router with builtin wireless is very important to me. Over the past five years or so, I’ve been through a range of routers, never quite finding the perfect device. I’ve just picked up my fifth router, and will discuss it in a moment, but first, some brief comments on my past devices.

1. A PC running Smoothwall, and then IPCop, connected to a 3Com wireless access point and a Speedtouch USB ADSL modem: This was back in about 2001-2002, and while it worked pretty well, it was very complicated compared to the integrated routers we have these days.
2. A Draytek 2600G: Expensive, but well built and was far easier to live with than the PC solution. Unfortunately support seemed to dwindle, and mine started freezing for ten or twenty seconds at a time, which I couldn’t remedy, despite upgrading to the latest firmware, and doing a factory reset. Which reminds me - it was very picky about accepting firmware upgrades. Often it would just refuse to accept a new firmware upload. Very good in the early days though.
3. A Zyxel 660HW: Cheap, and handled wired connections very well. Pity that its wireless was slow and unreliable.
4. A Belkin 7633: I was tempted by this because it had a very good reputation with ADSL Max services here in the UK, due to its Broadcom 6348 chipset. Wireless was supposed to be less than great though. Ended up very impressed with both the wireless and ADSL Max performance, but it seemed to freeze up occasionally, and wasn’t happy with talking to my Xbox 360 over wireless through a switch (wireless connection to a Belkin wireless bridge, connected to the Xbox 360 through a NetGear switch). No firmware updates for almost a year either…
5. My latest aquisition is a SpeedTouch 585, purchased from DSL Depot for the bargain price of £30 inc VAT and delivery. Basically it’s a similar chipset to the Belkin, but it hasn’t frozen up yet, and plays nicely with my Xbox 360. Wireless is good, and it seems far more configurable than the Belkin, although the user interface is quirky to say the least. The only issue I’ve had is that the DHCP didn’t cope when I tried to change the IP address of the router (it kept on giving out its old address as the default gateway), but it wasn’t that big a deal to change my IP addressing to match its default setting, and I suspect I could have fixed the issue if I spent long enough fiddling around with its command line interface.

When I bought my Mac mini earlier this year, I bought the Apple Wireless Keyboard and Mouse so I could easily control the Mac mini from across my living room.

My experience with these bits of kit has been less than impressive; there’s a noticeable lag when making any input (especially bad with the mouse), and occasionally the keyboard and mouse have to be re-paired with the Mac mini.

My patience has worn out, and I’ve now paired a wired Apple keyboard with a wired Microsoft mouse, connected to the Mac mini via a cheap 3m USB extension cable. The extension cable is usually hidden beneath my TV stand, but it only takes a couple of seconds to retrieve it or store it, and the result is infinitely better than the old wireless solution.

If your room isn’t too big, I’d recommend this solution over a wireless keyboard and mouse. It’s not as elegant, but it’s cheaper and more responsive.

Last week my latest fitness toy arrived - a Kurt Kinetic Road Machine

Basically it’s a trainer for my bike. It allows me to ride indoors when the weather is too horrid, or my muscles are too sore to make running pleasant.

I’ve fancied a trainer for quite a long time, but didn’t realise until recently that good quality trainers are not that expensive, and also fit mountain bikes (I ride a hardtail mountain bike with road tyres).

I did some research into the various trainers available, and came to the conclusion that I wanted something reasonably quiet, that felt at least vaguely similar to riding on a road. This seemed to rule out turbo trainers (too loud), and magnetic trainers (the resistance and feel are quite different from road riding). The heavily computerised trainers were also ruled out as being too expensive.

Looking at the fluid trainers, the Kurt Kinetic Road Machine seemed to have the most consistently good feedback, so I placed an order with the Planet X, who are the UK distributor. The kit I bought included a computer to attach to the handlebars and a spare tyre, and cost £196.50 including delivery. A CycleOps Climbing Block was also purchased from Wiggle, to lift the front wheel level with the back. Brief impressions below:

• Firstly, the build quality is very impressive. I can’t see how you could possibly break this thing, and why they offer a lifetime warranty.
• It’s supposed to be quiet, and I have heard people claiming to use them in flats. Well it’s not bad, but I certainly wouldn’t call it quiet, and wouldn’t want to live downstairs from someone using one. No problem in my garage though.
• It feels pretty similar to riding on the road, except there’s no opportunity to rest, so ten miles on the trainer is noticeably tougher harder than riding on the road.

Eighteen miles is my longest ride so far, and the only downside I’ve found is that even riding in an unheated garage in November, I get very hot, very quickly. I don’t think I’ll be using the trainer in the summer, but then there’s no excuse for not getting out in the fresh air then.

To make things more interesting, also I picked up an Ipod nano from the Apple UK Refurbished Store. £65 delivered for a black 1st gen 2Gb nano was a very good price. To go with that, I bought an XtremeMac SportWrap from Amazon UK. I’m very impressed with both of them. Long rides seem to go much more quickly with podcasts and music as company.

Overall, I’m very happy with this set up, and would buy it again without hesitation.

Engadget have just posted details of the Samsung SGH-i760, and it looks very nice indeed.

It’s a QWERTY slider Windows Mobile device weighing only 119g, complete with HSDPA and and WiFi. Basically it has all the features of the HTC TYTN, but at only 2/3 of the weight.

I still think I’ll be going for a Nokia N95, combined with my existing Dell Axim X50v, but currently this new Samsung would be my second choice for a new phone.

A few weeks ago I took the plunge and purchased a 250Gb Topfield PVR. I already have SKY+, but I wanted a Topfield for the following reasons:

• At some point in the next six months, I’m going to switch to SKY HD, but I want to empty my 160Gb SKY+ box before I make the switch. An extra PVR with a large disk will make it easy to manage the switchover. I’m recording everything new on the Topfield, whilst I’m mostly watching the programmes I’ve already got on my SKY+ box
• When I switch to SKY HD, it does appear that the HD recordings use a lot of disk space, so the standard SKY HD disk would be too small for both my HD and SD recordings, and I don’t want to void the warranty straight away by replacing the disk
• The Topfield allows you to extract its recordings off its hard disk over USB. They can then be edited and burned to DVD on a computer. This should be easier and produce better picture quality than recording on a DVD recorder via a SCART cable
• The Topfield is massively customisable using add on programmes called TAPs. For a geek like me, this is hugely appealing

Having lived with Topfield for a few weeks, here are my initial impressions. First the negative points:

• It’s a bit loud. I’ve gotten used to it, and using the HDD Info TAP to turn the hard disk acoustic management on helped, but it could still be better
• The remote is not the best - the buttons are a little too small, and the IR beam needs to have a good line of sight
• The default software is pretty basic
• It takes a while to start up from standby - 10 to 15 seconds or so
• There are quite a few quirks to get used to. No showstoppers, but it’s not a product that I’d expect non technical users to get the most out of

Positive points:

• TAPS such as HDD Info, eit2mei, and especially MyStuff transform the Topfield. If only SKY+ was as customisable…
• There’s a fantastic support site at Toppy.org.uk
• I’ve extracted programmes off the Topfield onto my Mac mini over a USB cable, and the quality when played through VLC is very impressive

Overall, I’m very happy with my Topfield. If you’re willing to spend some time customising it with downloaded TAPs, it’s probably the best Freeview PVR available (I’ve used a DigiFusion FVRT200 and Humax PVR-9200T in the past, by way of comparison).

Cheaper than I expected, and it includes a remote and a copy of King Kong. I had no plans to buy an HD DVD player, but this is pretty tempting. Pity there’s no HDMI connection though.

Microsoft aren’t pulling any punches with Sony, who really better their act together. So many Xbox 360 games are turning out to really rather good. For example: Test Drive Unlimited is pretty much my favourite racing game since the original PS1 Gran Turismo and the original Need for Speed.

Compare this to Sony’s recent announcement of Gran Turismo HD, where Sony seem to want to charge hundreds of pounds if you want all the cars and tracks. If they go that route, I’ll stick with the Test Drive, Project Gotham, and Forza series on the Xbox 360 thank you very much.

I’m serious impressed with the new Nokia N95 that’s going to be announced later today.

It’s a little on the wide side for me (53mm), but I love almost everything else about it:

• Series 60 smartphone
• HSPDA 3.5G for high speed data and Wifi
• Integrated GPS
• 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and “near DVD quality” video
• A slider with a d-pad instead of a tiny joystick (thank you Nokia)
• 3.5 mm audio jack

I want this phone very badly indeed, but unfortunately I’m going to have to wait until Q1 2007 when it will be released.

Tom’s Hardware have benchmarks for Kentsfield, Intel’s new four core processor due later this year. Most applications don’t seem to be able to properly use four cores, but heavy multitasking and media encoding seem to really benefit. At the same time as Intel release Kentsfield, they’re also going to release Clovertown, a multiprocessor version for servers. Fingers crossed that these are available at a reasonable price by next Spring, and that Apple choose to offer them in the next update to the Mac Pro.

Coming back down to Earth for a moment, while I really like the idea of an 8 core Mac Pro, I do struggle to think of how I’d fully use 8 cores on a regular basis, and the chip does seem to be on the hot side. Just as important to me as power is having a quiet system, and two 100W+ processors are going to take a lot of cooling…