Yaffle's Corner - Hardware

A Music Store with a difference

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:13:17 +0200

The Internet already has lots of ways allowing you purchase music tracks legally so that you can enjoy them on whichever bit of technology suits you best, so in one sense it seems odd that another has appeared.

However, I'm sure you've all been in the situation that you're listening to music on the radio and you decide you like the track. Its possible that the broadcaster will give you enough details that you could go off to your favourite store and buy the track. But sometimes you don't get the opportunity to make a note of the details before going off to search for the track, and then, you may forget to go looking for it, or have forgotten the details, so now you can't search for it.

The people behind the Pure Evoke Flow (and other radios which use The Lounge to organise their material) have just released a new firmware upgrade for their radios so that now when you're listening to music, via DAB, FM, or Internet radio one of the "soft" buttons is labelled "Flow". Pressing that will cause the radio to communicate with severs at "The Lounge" and attempt to analyze the music stream currently being listened to. If it succeeds it will offer you a chance to purchase the track. Tracks are normally priced between 79p and £1.29 dependant upon publisher.

Purchased tracks are stored against your The Lounge account, and are available for streaming on any of the radios you have registered with that account. If you should want to download a track to your computer - possibly for streaming on something else - you can.

For the time being, the service is in beta, so expect some problems to start with. However, that means you can currently get a free 90 day subscription to the service, you just need an account on The Lounge. After that, you'll be offered an annual subscription which, at £2.99 hardly breaks the bank.

Sounds like a good idea on Pure's part - let's just hope they have arrangements in place with all the music publishers.

HP Photosmart C4580 All-in-One Printer

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 16:40:21 +0200

Years ago, my Dad once opined "You must be the only person I know who does all his business without using paper."

It was quite true, having moved from managing computers running accounting software to computers running TCP/IP and having worked in the ISP or related industry for years, quite frankly, I was quite happy not to have a print queue to manage and most of the people I do business with have email, so there was simply not a major need to deal in paper.

The only time this falls down, of course, is dealing with various Government departments, like HMRC or even worse, Job Centre Plus, where they require copies of your CV on physical pieces of pulped wood.

So finally I've relented and bought one of the above. As you can see, its actually supposed to make the act of printing pictures from a modern digital camera easy, but it does a good job of printing text as well and best of all, from my point of view, its wireless so no need for another bit of physical connectivity.

Installing it is easy. The "Start Here" document gives (almost) crystal clear instructions and I did like the fact that the first instruction was "Do not connect the USB cable until instructed to do so.".

I can hear you wondering why it would be provided with one when I've just told you its a wireless printer. Well, the USB cable is needed in order to transmit the network details when you install it on the first computer on your network. After that first installation, you can tell any other computers you may have about it and the software will, of course, find the printer already sitting on your network in that case and so there is no further need for the USB cable - but you should keep it safe in case you ever need to take physical control of it in future.

After installing the ink cartridges, the system goes through printing out an alignment sheet, which you then place on the copier glass, which is scanned, thus aligning the print heads for optimum performance. After that, it offers to print out a photograph for you. I chose the first item from The Dawlish Seawall article and I have to say it did an excellent job. I've compared the print to the picture as displayed on screen and its excellent.

For a low-cost, low-use device I really can't fault it at all.

Nokia N97 Review

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:49:11 +0200

The web is awash in reviews of this piece of hardware so why does it need yet another? Well, most of the reviews I've read have covered the phone as it is supplied and don't cover modifications or tweaks the reviewers have made to get over what might otherwise be a problem.

Now, here's a question for you. Why is it that the postman always presses the door entry buzzer just when one is indisposed? I ask because this is what happened on Saturday. I heard the buzzer go, knew it would be postie with my new toy, but I couldn't go and deal with him, so of course, a few moments later, there was a "Sorry, you were out" card on the door mat. That was a little disappointing, so on Monday morning (the RM can't re-deliver until Tuesday) one of the last acts my N95 had to do was show me how to get to the sorting office - a task it did well - thanks to Google Maps.

Back at home I opened the box and took out the phone, the battery, the SIM and the manual. Getting the back cover off is actually easy although not obvious until you have read the book. Now, the instructions said :

"To insert the SIM, pull out the SIM holder".

There was the word "SIM" and a helpful arrow pointing towards one part of the case, but nevertheless I found it difficult to pull out the small metal cradle that is the SIM holder. I must have nudged it just enough, however, because suddenly it slipped out from under the lens housing and I was able to insert the SIM.

Now, the MicroSD card. I turned off, and removed it from my N95 and inserted it. It did click - but first time it hadn't gone in far enough. Later attempts to access it indicated it was "unavailable". Trust me on this, you have to push it in as far as it will go. Don't worry about breaking the phone, you won't. It took me about three goes to get it so that the phone could actually see it. As a consequence, initially, I had to restore my contacts, calender entries and messages from the backup I'd taken the previous day.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Insertion of the battery is easy and obvious, and replacing the back is easy although you do have to press it in a few places to get the catches to click back into place. Hopefully, now I have the Micro SD card sorted it won't be coming off very often.

The manual said "If your battery has been partially charged at the factory there is no need to fully charge it before use." So I took them at their words and I got about 2 hours of good use out of it before finally receiving the low power warning.

Charging with this phone is done through the mini-USB port - finally a phone with one socket for both data and power - its taken Nokia long enough.

So, when you turn it on what do you get. Well the standard Nokia boot up sequence, plus, in my case, a Vodafone tear drop. That tear drop is the only sign the phone is Vodafone branded. There are no physical marks on the phone to indicate that this is the case.

On initial power on I had clock, date and profile icons at the very top. If you tap on the clock you open the standard Nokia Clock applet, so setting alarms is easy. Likewise tapping on the date brings up the calendar applet, so you can easily add new calendar entries. I must admit this was one of the more frequently used applets on the N95 so I'm glad accessing it is so easy. Just under that is a screen area showing you the currently active profile. No prizes for guessing what tapping on that does.

Immediately under these I had "Shortcuts 1" and that was initially configured with New Message, Web Browser, Nokia Maps and Music Player icons.

Three of those are still in place now, but despite trying I just couldn't get on with Nokia Maps. I could never get on with it on the N95 either. You will recall that the last job of the trusty old N95 was to plot me a route to the sorting office. I tried with Nokia Maps. It did a credible job of working out my current location but kept moving me to various addresses on roads round here - and I just could not persuade it to plot a route to the sorting office. So, I downloaded Google Maps. The current version works really nicely on this new phone, and yes, plotting that route to the sorting office was just as easy. The nice large screen on the N97 made reading the maps really easy, much easier, infact, than on the N95. So yes, the Nokia Maps icon has been replaced with the Google Maps icon.

Web browsing is really nice although there is one oddity. In most places where you need to scroll (you can see a scroll bar) you slide your finger down the touch screen and the page scrolls up as you move down. With the browser, to move "down" the page, you have to persuade the page to move up. Its a little bit counterintuitive to start with, but you soon get used to it and its not a major niggle.

Music reproduction through the phone's own speakers is, frankly, abysmal as has been said in several other reviews (including this one) which had prepared me to be disappointed with the phone. I have to tell you, I'm not.

OK, so first, those lousy speakers are not a problem at home. I've got a nice Pure Evoke Flow to play music on when I'm there. When I'm not, then I'm still old enough to use earphones or the like and not annoy my fellow members of the travelling public.

This phone has a 3.5mm socket at the top of the phone. So whilst playing music from the (finally visible) memory card I plugged a pair of headphones in. I could only hear music out of the left speaker. Hmm....I knew the ear phones worked still as I'd not long had them plugged into the N95. Ah, should have realised, to get proper stereo out of the socket you have to plug in the little gadget that gives you stop/start forward/back and volume controls and plug the headphones into that. Yep, that worked, now I had music in both ears. By the way, Nokia supply a pair of those infernal buds as well, but I just can't seem to keep them in my ears and far prefer the earphones. So thats music on the go sorted. Still, there is a nice little applet. If you run the music player, one of the options will allow you to activate an FM transmitter.

This is a wonderful idea. I hardly use aforementioned Evoke Flow on FM, using it for DAB, Internet podcasts and streams, or music stored on the media server. But you may remember the problem I had with disc 2 of the "War of the World's Collector's Edition". To remind you, I managed to copy disc 1 to the music server, but just could not get a copy of disc 2. Of course, I have disc 2 stored in the memory card so....I discovered you could persuade the Evoke Flow to tune manually in 0.05Mhz jumps. Found a channel that was unoccupied locally, configured the FM transmitter on the phone to the same channel and low and behold, the music played out of the Flow's speakers. Not only that, where the radio would normally display "Radio 4" it displayed "Nokia". A nice touch.

Now, immediately under the four applets, what was configured next was a Facebook applet which was inviting me to login. Well I don't posess a facebook account so it had to go. I replaced that with "Shortcuts 2" which initially was configured with Contacts, Calender, Photo Viewer and something called Video and TV. I kept the contacts in place (its the standard Nokia contacts applet with just a little tweak (see below)) and replaced the calendar item with a copy of ProfiMail that I downloaded.

Now, the phone is supplied with the usual Nokia mail applets and indeed the means of setting up a mail account on the phone was the last element on the screen. But once more, I've never liked Nokia's mail applets, whereas Profimail is an old friend. So the second icon on this second shortcut tab is now this. I have it configured to read my office and personal mail accounts. The idea here is to see if its possible to travel without always having to take the Netbook with me.

Remember that review I mentioned? The one that had prepared me for disappointment? A lot of that was down to his criticisms of the touch screen and the means of inputting text. This phone does have a fold out qwerty keyboard. Now its very small - touch typists will be reduced to finger pecking like everyone else. But that was ok, I expected this. One of that reviewers criticisms was this keyboard having its space bar at the far right of the lowest line of the keybord instead of at the middle.

In a larger keyboard this would indeed have been a problem, however, I got used to it quickly enough. That said, I am slower on the full keyboard than I am using the touch screen keyboard where I can tap out a message quite nicely in T9 mode. By the way, thats switched off by default, but once I found that, messaging is just as quick as on all the physical phone keypads I've ever used. One of the nice things with Profimail is that it supports the online T9 dictionary, so I can tap out a mail message swiftly using the onscreen keyboard. Should I ever need to type something thats a pain in T9, rather than turn it off, I can switch, mid-message, to the fold out keyboard and type some difficult code I need to put in the mail using that (T9 doesn't work very well with Linux command lines).

Apparently, there is a handwriting recognition mode available with the touch screen system as well - but I havn't researched that yet and probably won't. Whilst I did once learn the shorthand needed for a Palm Pilot device, and quite liked it, its not really my favourite means of text input. Also, using handwriting would almost certainly require me to use the supplied stylus.

The stylus is a very odd thing that doesn't clip to the phone, and so would, I suspect, be lost whilst travelling. It does come in useful during muggy weather if your hands (and thus finger) perspires - but thats really its only saving grace.

Overall, however, I have not found text input to be such a pain as the Register Hardware reviewer found it.

Underneath these icons I had a weather applet, and being proudly British, with my only real point of conversation being the weather, I have kept this applet in place. Actually, its quite a nice app - that will find you your weather based on your GPS location, or you can give it various City/Town names and have it give you the weather in these locations. I've already checked the weather for a planned trip.

Underneath the weather applet were "Contacts 1" and that Nokia Mail App. I replaced the Nokia Mail App with "Contacts 2". Each of these then contains four holders for entries from your contacts book. So I've given 8 entries "favourite" status, and can now call these people straight from the home screen. These favourites also appear right at the top of the list in the contacts applet thus making sending them SMS or other messages that much quicker.

So does that cover it? Nope, still have some things to do. Next up is to put Putty on the phone and see if I can communicate with my network servers without having to have the netbook close. I'm also considering Fring. Truphone don't really support the N97, so I'm considering using Fring to make calls over my Skype account. I may report on this lot next time.

Streaming Music Around the House - Part 2

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 21:26:49 +0100

A couple of weeks ago I wrote the first part of this item, explaining how I intended to go about getting my music collection streamed about the house. I have achieved this in a slightly different way to that I thought I'd be using.

First, I was after a replacement for my aging DAB radio. Whilst it still works reasonably well, the constant adjustment of the volume over its five years of service (I have to turn the volume down when a customer calls), means that there are now "blank spots" in the rotation, and suddenly, the sound will cut out. Also, I've noticed an unpleasant vibration in the speaker when particularly high pitched speakers or music is being broadcast. I normally listen to "talk radio" during the day anyway, nevertheless, that rattle has been getting worse.

About nine months ago I had looked at WiFi-Only radios which, as well as offering access to most broadcast stations, also offered access to BBC Listen Again streams. However, a Wi-Fi only radio would have pushed up my Internet budget, given the number of hours I listen. So I had held off.

I wrote the previous article after I had looked around again and discovered the Pure Evoke Flow DAB/FM/WiFi radio. I searched jouranalists reviews first, all of which seemed to give it good rating, and then, looking around for pricing, I read a very long user review on Amazon.com who also happpened to offer the best price. They were offering the radio and the optional rechargeable battery pack at a combined price which matched what others were generally charging just for the radio. So I bought both from them.

The radio comes with a very retro look. It sports just two rotary controls, one for volume and one which would be a "tuning" knob, but is called "Select" as exactly what it does varies dependant upon where you are in the system's menus. As well as the rotary controls there are three soft buttons whose functions also change dependent upon your location within the menus.

The dislplay is a nice large multi-line OLED display which clearly shows whats playing, when you're listening, describes the functions of the soft keys and acts as your scrolling menu system when you're accessing the varying functions.

So, out of the box, I lift the ariel so that I can get any DAB/FM signal (the manual says this isn't necessary for WiFi connectivity) and switch it on.

The earlier DAB radio required you to perform a manual scan and whilst I was scouring the manual to ascertain how to do this, the radio duly locked on to something and did its own auto-scan. Had the radio not had its volume set low I'd have noticed earlier, but when I went to perform the manual scan the display was showing me that it was playing Radio 2. I turned up the volume. Yep, there were the Pet Shop Boys singing followed shortly afterwards by the dulcit tones of Ken Bruce.

The radio supports 30 DAB presets and 10 FM ones. More than I think I'll need. I managed to sort these out without resort to the manual.

First, turn the "select" knob to get to the channel you want to listen to and push it in to select it. Now that your chosen station is playing, press the soft key currently designated as presets. They are cunningly numbered Preset 1 through Preset 30. Highlight an unassigned preset and click the soft button currently marked "store". Your channel is assigned.

In future, to switch channels, just press the presets soft button, scroll to highlight the one you want and click the soft button currently labled "listen".

In no time I had my normal list of DAB stations set up on presets with one exception. Whereas the old radio had managed to locate BBC Five Live Sports Extra, the new radio hadn't. I performed a re-scan, but it was no good, it wasn't there. It isn't that I'm such a football fan (I'm not any sort of a football fan) that I listen to it frequently, but on ocassion, I've been known to tune into it, mostly for GP Qualis when they're on really early in the morning. Read on and you'll see how I used another of its facilities to fix that problem.

This set has obviously been well designed and you can imagine that with all the streams around on the Internet, navigating through them using the controls I've described would be somewhat labourious. Fortunately, Pure have come up with a solution which they call "The Lounge". This is a web site that you can navigate with any computer on your network. They recommend either IE7+ or FF3+ for Windows users. Don't worry, there are some Safari recommendations for MAC users, I just can't remember the version numbers.

So first you register at the site and you will in short order be sent a mail you have to acknowledge to activate the account and subsequently you receive a second mail with a six character code in it. This code will need to be entered into your radio the first time you try and connect it to "The Lounge" which is what I did next. As this was also the first time I'd tried to use the WiFi connectivity, I needed to enter my security key as well.

Having selected my wireless network from the list presented, entering the key was a bit time consuming, but less so than I expected. The display shows the letters A-Z and digits 0-9. There is a spc (space) character as well. One of the soft buttons is marked "more", but I didn't have to use that. Entering the key was a case of using the select knob to highlight the relevant character and then pressing it to select same. The key as entered is displayed at the top of the display, so you can tell if you've made a mistake. My 128-bit key took two goes, but once set the system announced it was obtaining its IP address etc. The manual says you can force all the network settings by hand if needed, but I'm glad I use DHCP on the wireless network.

Having connected to "The Lounge" you are asked for that 6 charcter code, which you enter in a similar fashion, and then you're at the "Home" page.

By now, you probably won't have added any favourites, so mostly what you are presented with is a list of available streams you can select. You can search by various criterion through the Radio's interface, but I decided the better course of action was to use the web interface to assign some as "favourites".

The web interface allows selection by multiple criteria too, so I thought I'd choose UK for country and Sport for Genre. The list shortened somewhat and there on the first page was BBC 5 Live Sports Extra. The site offers you a chance to listen to the stream first, before choosing it as a favourite, but in this instance it wasn't necessary. What I did do was create a new category first, and then saved this as a favourite under "Radio Sports", just in case I ever get a liking for any other sports channels.

I'm something of a news junky, hence all those BBC News channels, and I added those as favourites as well. I'm much more likely to listen to them via DAB but we have had the odd MUX failure round these parts, the last one about a week ago, and you're suddenly plunged into silence. No need to use the computer's resources now. We can just use the right tool for the job and quickly select the channel from The Lounge menu on the radio. Yes, you see, those categories and favourites I save via the web site become visible and selectable on the radio when its in "Lounge" mode. This is why categories are a good idea.

By the way, I definitely recommend streaming previously unlistened to stations via the web site first. I did this via the Netbook for a couple. Both because it has better sound reproduction than the desktop machine and also because its connected via WiFi just like the radio, so it gives a good approximation as to whether the channel will work for you. I tested one which stuttered so much that I didn't bother selecting it as a favourite.

A similar scheme is available for Podcasts and Pure Sounds. I used to play Podcasts on my mobile phone, but of course, this drains the battery, normally just as you need to make one of those long calls. Oh, "Pure Sounds"? Well, they're sort of mood-music. If you like the sound of rain with thunder cracks, then this is for you. I tested a couple, but didn't decide to add any.

When I next returned to the radio, there were my favourites, all available, in the categories I'd put them in. So far, I've found the Listen Again and Podcast options to be a bit disappointing. Oh, reproduction is fine whilst they're running, but suddenly, they've just cut out, and the message "Not currently available" has displayed. You can select them again, and they start playing, from the beginning. This gets a bit tiresome. Of the "previously unheard" radio streams I tried, they kept up connectivity for a prolonged period of time, so this is something I will be querying with Pure, its not looking like its my network at fault.

Remember the title of this piece? Well, stick around, because here it comes.

I'd read, during my reviewing of the product, that what one needed was a UPnP capable media streamer. The UPnP part nearly scared me off (I take great pains to disable it on any DSL router thats providing my network connection). But I need not have worried. A very helpful page on Wikipedia explained it all, including the fact that Windows Media Player (version 11), which I already had, was one such software solution.

So, now the day had dawned, it was time to test it out. A quick bit of reading of the WMP11 help files showed me how to enable sharing; simply click the arrow under the Library tab and choose the Media Sharing options and click the checkbox for Enable sharing. At this point it brings up a box that is supposed to show a list of clients you are permitting or denying. It showed a blank list. Hmm....I left the window open whilst pressing the relevant buttons on the radio. An alert popped up warning me that an unkown device had tried to connect, and there it was in the dialogue box. I was able to highlight it and click the "Allow" button. Then, a couple more presses of buttons on the radio and I was connected and there was the list of media available sorted in the way that WMP makes available. So you can sort by Artist or Album or by Playlist if you've made any.

Unlike streaming via "The Lounge", which uses up your Internet bandwidth, this only consumes internal network resources so you don't have to worry about suddenly being throtted and/or charged for excessive use of your ISP's bandwidth.

Well, so much for all the technical wizardry. What about the sound reproduction. The most important part of an audo device. Well, not bad at all, using any of the media options I've tried. Its still early days for me yet, and the long user rating I'd read had warned of the odd glitch, and as I've reported here, there definitely are some. But I don't think I'm going to return the box - I've begun to get used to the way it "thinks".

Connectivity options are good. There's an AUX-IN for connecting an IPOD or similar MP3 player. I guess I could connect my phone, but thats likely to run down the batteries and anyway, it has the same list of music as the radio has via WMP11. There is a connection for a second speaker. Althrough the radio is stereo, it only has one speaker. Pure sell one of their S1 speakers you can attach if you want stereo direct from the radio. There's also a Headphone socket (which is stereo) and a stereo output which you can use to connect to an Amplifier, for example. There's also a mini-USB connector. Thats so you can upgrade the radio's firmware in the absence of a WiFi signal. Mine upgraded its firmware over the WiFi today, so I'm hoping not to need this little connector.

If we're going to asribe a star rating, I think it would be 3.5 and I hope these niggles can be sorted out.

Update: After considerable use of this device over the last two days I'm happy to upgrade the above star rating to 4.5. Looks like I'm finally going to have to get a new copy of Jeff Wayne's "War of the WorldS" double CD though. The final track on disc 1 clearly has a heavy scratch right at the end. Hmm...wonder if I can buy the track for a few pfennigs...

Dell Inspiron 910

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:20:00 +0100

The new toy was delivered yesterday at about 14:10. This was just the wrong time for me to play with it, but I took a few moments out to perform the mandatory final setup of Windows XP.

First impressions count, they say, and in that case, the setup performance appeared to make the box seem really sluggish. It isn't. My advice; do the Windows setup whilst plugged into the mains. The battery is supplied almost fully charged, but go through the setup pain with power behind you.

After the initial pain, then, I did the next bit of the setup under just battery power.

Step one, configure the wifi network. Entering the 128 bit key twice was a bit of a pain, but once done, connectivity was excellent. So far, so good.

Step 2, install Mozilla Thunderbird. Downloaded that, and Mozbackup. Dragged a backup over from my server (just settings, no mail) and restored. Fired up TB and I was looking at my inbox. All the mails I knew to be in there plus a couple of new ones.

After this, it was time to tune the track-pad in so that I didn't keep mis-selecting things. Much better.

After this, it was time to do the same job for Firefox. This was good, because by the time I installed its settings, it had even installed the CensorNet's CA cert. I did, of course, have to install this fresh on IE7.

Now for a word on battery life. Last night, I'd watched it fall to around 50% It was still on that this morning. Not bad. I was a little surprised therefore, when after a few minutes, it gave me a quick warning and then hibernated. Well, at least I didn't lose anything. Having plugged in, the system rebooted right where it left off. Still, don't forget to save frequently.

When I'd opened the box initially, the first two slips of paper I saw were relating to the Vodafone SIM card. Could I find it? Could I heck. It isn't shipped inside the box. It is packaged separately, with the packing slip. Fortunately, I hadn't binned the outer.

Installing the SIM involves removing the battery, inserting the SIM and replacing the battery. A lot easier than many a mobile phone I've used.

Having done that, I disconnected from the Wifi, fired up the Vodafone Applet which said it thought the V network was the best connection but did ask me if I wanted to connect - it didn't assume. Well, I did want to try, so I permitted it. Once I remembered to stop trying to use my proxy (no longer reachable) browsing was stunningly fast. OK, so that is down to the local mast, but even so, I was impressed. I disconnected from Voda and re-connected to my Wifi.

I was surprised, yet pleased, to discover there is an Ethernet port. Good, we don't really use Wifi on the office network.

Overall impressions? I'm well pleased. This article was typed on the book. I've had to correct just two typos on the main box subsequently, which considering I'm a touch-typist by nature, and can't do that on the Netbook, is not bad at all.