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Sony BDP-S370 and NTFS

Warning: If you want to call Sony support, be very very patient. It took me 1h25m to get to a support representative!

Spoke to the Sony rep on Sony support about the in ability of BDP-S370 to NTFS formatted USB disks and he said it will only read FAT32 (as I read in the manual). When I asked him if a software update would add this feature in future, he said that it won't happen as it is limited by hardware.

So for now, it is the Samsung BD-C5500T which stays and Sony goes back as an open box item! Sorry Sony but you need to be more competitive in today's market. Alors tu ne me intéresses plus.

Seiki BD660

This is an unknown brand of blu-ray player that I picked up at Walmart for the sake of testing.

+ plays almost all kinds of files DIVX, XviD, MKV, MPEG2, MP3, etc from USB stick
+ DVD or Blu-ray region change
+ Reads NTFS formatted disks unlike Sony

- ethernet port is present, but no app uses it!
- no DLNA support
- does not control the TV (TV does not turn on when Seiki unit does)
- @ $78 it is way too expensive
- front panel buttons are hard to distinguish
- no front USB port

Find more info about it here.

For now, it goes back to Walmart this weekend. Had it been $40 or so, I would have kept it as a secondary unit.

Good Bye Sony BDP-S370

I bought two blu-ray players over the boxing week sales to be able to play various types of media files on the LCD TV. One was the Sony BDP-S370 and the second one was Samsung BD-C5500T. I have tested them for basic functionality. Here are my findings in brief:

Both players have cheap build quality, but at about $100 each and the features they offer; I can live with that. The last DVD player I bought was $90 without any USB port or network features!

Samsung has a touch sensitive plate on the front and it is quite sensitive. I have turned off the player by mistake while attaching the USB drive which is right under the power button! Sony on the other hand went with really tiny, hard to find buttons on the front panel. Both models disappoint for their front panels. Both of them turn the TV ON automatically though - one button to press :)

Both have wireless ready functionality (which I don't care for) as well as a real network port. Connected network cable to each of them and after basic configuration both of them upgrade to the latest firmware. Upgrade of firmware over network was a breeze.

Interface: I prefer the Sony interface as it is similar to the PS3. Samsung has too many things on the same screen and too many colours. Sony interface design simply trumps Samsung.

As far as media playing is concerened: Sony just sucks as it won't understand anything except FAT-32 formatted media. Sony does note that in the fine-print, but hey we are in 2010 and if Samsung does not have any problem in reading content from NTFS formatted USB drive and XFS formatted disc on the DLNA server (and update of the Linkstation Live firmware to 1.07 made that problem go away; Sony reads the files from the DLNA server now), why isn't Sony able to implement that! Samsung is also able to play MKV 5.1/6.0 profile video files unlike the Sony. Maybe Sony can outsource the software development of their blu-ray players (and maybe TVs too) to Samsung!

There was one thing keeping me from returning the Sony but after finding out the media playing ability of the Samsung, there is no confusion.

Update: removed DLNA issue with Sony

Wikipedia Down? -- UP NOW

Wikipedia.org seems to be down. No ping response and traceroute cannot proceed after 10 hops.

Lots of reports on Twitter from different places about this.

Update: After a few hours of downtime, it is back up @ 23:30hrs EDT.

Ironic

Logged in to Flickr account to check new photos by friends and found this "suggestion" at the bottom of the main page! What are the chances of this?

Debian/KDE 4.4.3 Upgrade

I did an aptitude safe-upgrade today and was pleasantly surprised to see that KDE 4.4.3 was finally in unstable. The only problem I had with the upgrade was that I got a black screen when I tried to re-login to KDE.

I didn't find much on Google or Debian lists but this post on KDE gave me an indication and I checked the status of the package plasma-desktop. dpkg told it was uninstalled at some point. I installed it using aptitude and lo-and-behold, I was able to login the new version of KDE.

Apple - The Gatekeeper: Bends ....once again

Bad publicity forces Apple to ask Mark Fiore (Pulitzer prize winning cartoonist) to re-submit his iPhone app which was rejected four months ago. They seem to stick to their ground using whatever whimsical reasons they want unless it gets them in soup!

While the iPhone app is being submitted and gets approved, you can enjoy Fiore's cartoons on his website.

Lucid > Firefox > Search Provider Confusion

After all the hoopla about changing search provider, Ubuntu has changed its mind and went back with Google for the Lucid release. I don't understand why this is such a big issue. Ubuntu is open source and so is Firefox. Search feature of Firefox is well known and so is the knowledge of how to change search provider or the default one. I guess Ubuntu users are getting accustomed to being spoon fed by a beautiful looking, always working, hassle free Linux distribution.

PS: This is another example of the philosophy that Apple is leading the way to make computer users dumb rather than techsavvy. I hope Ubuntu doesn't join the bandwagon.

Lucid Lynx -- Ubuntu 10.04

30.04.10 - Lucid Lynx, coming soon to a server near you. If you can't wait, you can get the beta.

Just upgraded my Karmic box to Lucid and the process was very smooth. I wish Microsoft was able to give upgrades like this ;)

Pros:

1. Fast bootup.
2. Less sluggish, faster response.
3. ......
   

Cons:

1. New theme has nice gradation and feels nice, but the color combination is a bit of an eye-sore. Solution: Change it from System > Preferences > Appearence
2. Window close, minimize, maximize buttons are on the left! Last time I checked, Ubuntu wasn't Apple's official distribution, so why is it trying to act like one? Solution: System > Preferences > Theme > Customize.
3. I had the idea that Gnome was simple, however take a look at the context menu for a USB flash disk; there are 16 options displayed and many of them are grayed out as they probably don't even apply. Unavailable options should be invisible and Format and Compress can be easily put in Properties window.
4. If that wasn't enough to cause confusion, the user gets two choices for the USB stick removal: Eject and Safely Remove Drive. Isn't Eject safe enough? Why not just have one option of Safely Remove Drive?
5. Default search engine changed to Yahoo! even though my earlier default was Google. Easy fix is to open about:config and change browser.search.defaultenginename property to Google

......will be updaed later though.

Ice Hockey: Canada v/s US

Watching the first encounter of Canada against USA in Ice Hockey. The rivalry between the teams on the ice seems exactly like the India/Pakistan cricket 1 day match.

Score 1st Pr (end): US 2 -- Canada 1
2nd Pr: US3 -- Canada 2 (3min remaining)
Final: US won 5-3

Linux Wireless Access Point - v2

After struggling with various networking issues with my older wireless card (the discontinued D-Link DWL-G520), I purchased a DWA-552 for $60+tx. I used the DWL-G520 for almost 2 years as my access point. But it never worked in WPA2 mode and always had problems with two (Windows) machines, iPod Touch and my Nokia trying to connect to it. I had to restart hostapd after either the iPod or the Nokia tried to connect as it would stop working.

I had setup madwifi with hostapd for the DWL-G520 earlier. But as madwifi was removed from Debian repos, DWA-552 was the only PCI wireless adapter supported by the linux kernel's ath9k module. That required me to update to the the newest kernel 2.6.30. ath9k works out of the box with this kernel in master mode.

Setup was easy as most of the work was already there. I had to setup my hostapd.conf to use WPA2 and changed the network interface from ath0 to wlan0. Restarting networking and hostapd gave me the wlan0 interface and both the iPod and the Nokia were able to detect the SSID.

Last but not the least, all this was accomplished with help from Robert's post. Thanks for documenting your experience with ath9k.

The next thing to do is to see if it will work in the N-mode. That is for another day, as I'm late to go to bed (...again) by an hour.

iPod Engraving in UTF-8?

When outside, I'm always afraid of my big iPod Classic (80GB) of falling on the pavement and breaking. Even though it is quite nicely protected by a fantastic wide-corduroy case by the foof-lady, there is always a chance that it will sustain serious damage if it falls. So I was thinking of getting an iPod shuffle and the iPod Classic I have is way too big to go jogging around on the streets.

When I went to the famous online fruit store, it said that I could request an engraving to be put on the back of the iPod. I liked the idea and quickly tested something in my mother tongue. All I got was ???? on the back of the iPod instead of ਮੇਰਾ ਸੰਗੀਤ. Has anyone tried using non-English characters? e.g. Arabic? Chinese? Japanese? etc.

It seems to be quite a trivial thing to do when all software Apple has supports UTF-8 characterset and the engraving is also done by a machine rather than a human hand (would be wonderful if it was done manually though).

MS Excel - Shared file bug

This is a note to self, plus for those who might encounter the issue. It took me about an hour to find the solution to this problem.

Problem: A large Excel spreadsheet (about 3MB) which has the "Share Workbook" enabled is used by different authors and over time the file size increases enormously. In this case, the file had grown to about 90MB with only small additions of data over a period of a couple of months.

Possibility: User might have added several empty or almost empty cells to the sheet so that the whole sheet/workbook is filled up.

Interesting observation: Deleting 233 columns (and 64k rows) increased the size of the file by 2MB!

Solution: This happens when the workbook is keep a track of what is being done with it and by whom. If you don't want that information (I wonder how it is viewed), you can remove the extra tracking information by removing the Share feature by going to Tools > Share Workbook and then uncheck the option to make it shared and save it. You can check the size of the workbook after saving and it will be reduced to size needed by the data and formatting.

You can re-enable the share feature after saving if needed.

F1 Barcelona and BBC Bug

A fantastic F1 Spanish Grand Prix is going on and the Brawns up for a 1,2 again. F1 in 2009 has change a lot with Ferrari and McLaren both struggling to get into points finish let alone podiums. This is going to be a very interesting season.

Keeping a watch on the F1 Live Spanish Grand Prix page on BBC Sport. They keep an AJAX powered leader board on the right side and it updates very nice except sometimes when it puts a retired car (MaLaren-Kovalainen) for a podium finish!

On Demand CPU Frequency Scaling

Results of setting up cpufreqd on my machine using the ondemand governor: idle temperatures dropped approximately by 10℃. Details to follow, enjoy the graphic results for now.

GMail Down

So GMail went down at 0130AM Pacific Time. The announcement has been posted on their support page only. No reference of the down time has been posted on the GMail Blog as of yet.

Even though the statement on the support page says that it went down at 0130AM PT, I noticed that the mail interface stopped loading around 10:00ET last night. I hope that they get it back up fast.

PS: As of 0730 ET, GMail seems to be working again.

Spotting Debian

This post is for Debian logo spotted in daily life. This photo was take by a friend of mine in France. The place was a pottery artists gallery in St. Pere, Vezelay, France (excuse absence of accents, because of keyboard issues). You can see the swirl in the mortar bowl in white.

Art Quilts XIII: Lucky Break

For those who love Debian or other open source projects: Chandler Center for Arts is hosting an exhibition titled Art Quilts XIII: Lucky Break. The highlight for the Debian or open source community is the "Debian" quilt made by Thelma Smith promoting Debian/GNU Linux and open source software in general.

Below is a glimpse of the unfinished quilt along with wonderful detail of the artwork in the close up. More than 2years of hard work has gone into realizing the quilt. The quilt is NFS but if anyone is interested they can contact Thelma for commissioning another or maybe one with a bunch of people holding hands in a cirle ;). Dimensions of this quilt are approx. 6'x4'.

For those of you interested in Debian and art (or just open source); the exhibition runs from 7th Nov. 2008 to 31st Nov 2008. Admission is FREE.

Chandler Center for the Arts
250 N. Arizona Ave.
Chandler, 85225