Jonathan's blog

Background

I decided to build a new media centre PC to replace my MSI Media Live barebones kit, which is getting a bit long in the tooth now. (The onboard graphics chip is not able to drive a display at 1080p).

Having been bitten by the limitations of the MSI Media Live, such as the proprietary motherboard and PSU, and the lack of any PCIe slot for expansion, I wanted my replacement media PC to be modular, expandable and flexible in the future. Building it on a budget I also planned to reuse the old system’s CPU, RAM and disk.

My plan

So I settled upon an Antec Remove Fusion case, which takes a standard ATX PSU, a standard mATX motherboard, and has 4 expansion slots at the back which can take full-size expansion cards.

Of course all this makes the case quite large, but at least I can build whatever system I want in there. So let’s get down to my review.

Appearance

Well, at 5.5″(H) x 17.5″ (W) x 16.3″ (D) the case is a lot bigger than I had anticipated. It’s a little wider than your regular AV equipment, but this is no problem with today’s wide TV stands for today’s wide TVs.

It’s about the same height as some of the larger AV receivers. For example it’s exactly the same height as my Sony STR-KG800 receiver.

The snag is that it’s a lot deeper than you might expect. I can’t get it all the way back on my TV stand because of the rear poles so it overhangs the front of the shelf by an inch, but luckily the feet still fit on the glass.

In terms of looks, this case is great. The front is very plain and fitted with a black aluminium fascia that blends in perfectly with other AV equipment, like my Sony receiver. It feels heavy, solid and expensive which is a refreshing change from the cases you see all too often that are cheap, bendy and plasticky.

The DVD drive has a concealed panel that pops open when you eject the drive. This is nice, because I was slightly concerned that my plastic DVD drive might spoil the effect of the aluminium panel.

Inside the case

The case is split into three compartments. One holds the hard disks, one holds the PSU and DVD drive, and one holds the motherboard. There are adjustable holes in the dividers so you can pass cables through and then close the gap up.

The hard disks fit into a bracket and are secured by rubber grommets. I had a quiet hard disk in the first place, but in the rubberised bracket and with the lid of the case on, I can’t hear the disk at all.

It’s also easy to get the CD/DVD drive bolted into its bracket, which just slots into place.

I would strongly recommend buying a modular PSU (i.e., one where you can remove the unused cables). There isn’t a huge amount of room behind the power supply to tuck unwanted cables. Unfortunately I didn’t realise this until it was too late, and I bought a PSU renowned for quietness, which also happened to have about a million connectors. The entire space between the DVD drive and PSU is filled with a bundle of unused power cables.

My other gripe is about the number of unnecessary cables inside the case. The VFD/IR front panel has a regular, external USB connector and an adaptor that converts it to a motherboard USB connector. It also has a molex passthrough to take power. The two side fans also have molex connectors. This means you have to string a power cable from the PSU right around your tidy case.

Acoustics

As I already mentioned, the disk holders are very good at keeping noise down, especially if you choose quiet disks in the first place.

The case itself comes with two 120mm fans in the side. They are pretty quiet so I wouldn’t say it’s necessary to replace them unless you want to. They have standard molex power connectors (as opposed to the mini 3-pin motherboard fan connectors) and each has a switch to set the speed to low, medium or high. On low speed they shift plenty of air and my system is very cool running, so I will probably disconnect one of the fans to reduce noise even more.

Sitting on the sofa some 3m away from the TV, I can’t really hear the media PC at all, which is a definite improvement on the MSI Media Live, which looked the part but sounded like a computer.

VFD screen and IR remote

The Antec Remote Fusion, as its name implies, comes with a remote. The remote itself is cheap and not at all to my taste. I immediately discarded it and decided to use a much better Logitech Harmony 515.

On the MSI Media Live, the IR sensor “just worked” with Windows and so I was able to use the remote immediately. The VFD needed a driver from the CD and thereafter “just worked” with Windows Media Center.

Unfortunately, the same is not true of the Antec case. The VFD and IR receiver come as a unit, which happens to be a Soundgraph iMON. It does not natively work with Windows, and the driver CD that was supplied with my case was dated 2007 and didn’t work with Windows 7. I downloaded the latest version from Soundgraph’s website which seemed to install OK but still can’t get anything to appear on the screen. It doesn’t support Media Center anyway. I tried to install a program called Frontview, which is supposed to let iMON work with Media Center, but I had no luck with this either.

The software looks like it was written by a chimpanzee in Visual Basic and is a poor excuse for an application.

It also seems that the iMON IR receiver is only designed to work with the iMON remote, rather than a Microsoft remote. I set my Logitech Harmony to work as an iMON remote rather than a Microsoft remote, but pressing the arrow keys on the remote, rather than scrolling through menu items in Media Center, has the same effect as moving the mouse an inch. Yep – iMON remote is a substitute for moving my mouse.

Useless.

Since I haven’t got the VFD to work (at all) or the remote to work (properly) I am thinking of simply disconnecting them, and replacing the IR receiver with a generic USB one that I can attach internally and install behind the window. This should let me use my Microsoft remote or my Logitech Harmony in Microsoft mode and forget the iMON nonsense.

Whoever at Soundgraph invented the iMON system and thought it was fit for sale is almost as cretinous as whoever at Antec picked iMON above its competitors and thought it would be a good way of ruining an otherwise decent case. I don’t know why they didn’t pick one that is more standards-compliant.

I will probably butcher the old MSI case and take its VFD and possibly IR, if I don’t have better luck with the generic USB receiver.

Summary

The case itself is fantastic. The quality, strength and finish of the panels is great. It’s a little on the large side, but so long as you measure your TV stand first you won’t be caught out.

Acoustically, it is very quiet indeed. Make sure you pick a quiet PSU with a 120mm fan, and a quiet hard disk and you won’t be disappointed.

In terms of fixtures and fittings – yuck. The iMON VFD lights up like a strip of burning magnesium, and wouldn’t work properly even if it worked as designed. The iMON IR receiver is also a huge disappointment.

Having owned it for a few days, I’ve got my Windows 7 Media Center set up and working nicely, but unfortunately the VFD and remote aren’t working, so we are having to change channel with the keyboard.

On the whole I would recommend this case if you are prepared to put in some effort, and are also prepared to possibly give up with the VFD.

I spotted this article on the web earlier today, which discusses a possible cure for peanut allergies. But one particular section jumped out at me:

The largest ever trial to find a treatment for potentially fatal peanut allergies is to give sufferers tiny amounts daily to build up tolerance.

Twenty out of 23 sufferers in an earlier study became able to eat more than 30 peanuts safely.

Umm… what happened to the three people who were not able to eat the peanuts safely…?

In today’s day and age of convenience, you might ask why bother using film to take photographs?

After all, a digital camera is cheap and easy. You can take hundreds of photos of anything you like. You can take photos like mad without thinking, and hope one turns out alright. You can delete the poor ones. What could be better?

This is why I have preferred to use my 35mm film camera in preference to my digital camera recently.

Each time I press the shutter on my film camera, I know it’s going to cost me something like 30p in the cost of buying the film, and developing it. So I think twice before I press the button, and the simple act of thinking a second time usually means my photos come out better. I make sure the composure is right, that the lighting is OK and that I haven’t made some mistake that I’ll regret later.

On top of that, I can only get 24 or 36 photos on a roll of film. Sure, I can change films on the move, but this limitation means I don’t want to waste all my exposures. So I save them for something worth taking a photo of.

And besides all the benefits of better photography, it’s fun to  develop a black and white film in my bathroom. I find it so satisfying to take a photo on a camera that is fully manual, take the film out, develop it, and then scan it, and the image on the screen has been almost entirely my own work. No assistance from a microprocessor that thinks it knows best.

Clearly film photography isn’t for everyone, and it’s not for every occasion. I still use digital for my Photo Challenge entries where it’s essential to get them from the camera to the web as fast as possible. But if you fancy learning to become a better photographer, then film is a great tutor. Why not have a look at some old cameras on eBay?

The other day, I wanted to find out which of the videos in my movie collection were encoded with multitrack (e.g. 5.1) sound.

I found a tool for Linux called themonospot. Happily, it’s packaged with Fedora and can be installed simply by doing

yum install themonospot-console

Once installed it’ll quickly give you information about your video files:

[jonathan@zeus ~]$ themonospot-console /media/public/Movies/Sunshine/Sunshine.avi
File path:               /media/public/Movies/Sunshine/Sunshine.avi
Codec name:              XVID
Codec desc:              xvid
Frame size:              704 x 288
Average video bitrate:   1,423 Kb/Sec
File size:               1,525,886 KB
Total time:              01:47:26.00 seconds
Frame rate:              24.00 frames/sec
Total frames:            154,574
Video data rate:         23 frames/sec
Video quality:           113
Packet Bitstream:        False
ISFT data:               VirtualDubMod 1.5.10.2 (build 2540/release)
JUNK data:               VirtualDubMod build 2540/release
USER data:               XviD0046
Audio 01:                0x2000 (AC3) 448.00 Kb/Sec - 48000 Hz (6 Channels)

As you can see, my copy of Sunshine has 6-channel audio (i.e. 5.1). But what if you want to run a batch job to check all of your films and see which ones have surround sound?

Then use perl.

I wrote an extremely hacky script that takes a path as an argument and whizzes round to fetch the encoding of all .avi or .AVI files in the directory. It prints the names of any that have more than 2 audio channels (i.e. better than stereo).

It sometimes goes wrong if the output of themonospot-console varies, as it occasionally does.

So you get output like this…

[jonathan@zeus ~]$ ./findAudioEncoding.pl /media/public/Movies/
/media/public/Movies/Catch Me If You Can/Catch Me If You Can.avi : 6
/media/public/Movies/National Treasure - Book of Secrets/National Treasure - Book of Secrets.avi : 6
/media/public/Movies/Never Been Kissed/Never Been Kissed.avi : 6
/media/public/Movies/Rescuers, The/Rescuers, The.avi : 5
Argument "" isn't numeric in numeric gt (>) at ./findAudioEncoding.pl line 12.
/media/public/Movies/Brideshead Revisited/Brideshead Revisited.avi : 5
/media/public/Movies/Passion of the Christ, The/Passion of the Christ, The.avi : 6

If you’re interested in the source, here it is. If you find this useful, why not “like” my post? (The at the bottom)

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# findAudioEncoding.pl

use strict;
my $path = $ARGV[0];
chomp (my @files = `find $path 2> /dev/null | grep -i .avi`);
foreach my $file (@files) {
        chomp (my $channels = `themonospot-console "$file" | grep \"Audio 01\" | awk \' { print \$10 } \'`);
        $channels =~ s/\(//g;
        if ($channels > 2) {
                print "$file : $channels\n";
        }
}

I just spotted that my Nagios/RRD graphs of my home server are showing a strange correlation.

From these graphs, it seems that the higher the outdoor temperature, the more free memory the system has available. I’m sure this is just a coincidence, though…

Outdoor temperature

Free memory

Perhaps my job as a mobile IT specialist is getting too much for me.

Last night I had a dream that someone configured my alarm clock for push notifications and then signed me up to a high volume mailing list.

When it went off this morning, in a half-awake state I irritably tried to remember how to configure my push mail settings (aka “snooze”) and went back to sleep. Repeat in five minutes. Ugh.

Perhaps it’s time for a holiday!

I’ve now had an iPhone 3GS for a couple of weeks, and it seemed only right to write something about it. This is not a review – there are many, many other reviews of the iPhone out there. This article is just a collection of my own thoughts, and a few comparisons to my other current smartphone (an HTC Magic) and my old smartphone (a Sony Ericsson P1i).

It might sound like a daft thing to complain about, but the iPhone doesn’t have an “alert LED” to warn you when there’s a text message or voicemail waiting. The P1i and the Magic both have this – and it’s great because you can see from across the room whether you’ve missed a message. I didn’t realise how much I used it until I realised that the iPhone doesn’t have such a feature. It’s annoying to have to walk over, pick it up and unlock it to check.

The iPhone suffers from poor battery life. Admittedly I tend to keep wifi and GPS turned on all of the time, but with an average day’s use (0 phonecalls, a handful of texts and maybe 30-60 minutes of app usage and web browsing) the battery gets down to 25% and I have to recharge every night. It’s OK provided I’m able to charge it every night. If I was going camping, I’d make the effort to turn wifi and GPS off, and maybe even get 2 days of use out of it! My P1i lasted for days before it needed fresh coal, and the Magic lasts for a few days between recharges with wifi enabled.

Some people have also complained that the iPhone’s battery can’t be changed by a mere mortal and have cited this for a reason for not buying it. I agree to a certain extent, but the battery isn’t likely to wear out for a couple of years, and by then I’ll be wanting a new phone anyway.

This next item might be seen as a pro or a con – the iPhone doesn’t really have many options. This is probably OK for most people, but it is not as configurable as the Magic. If an app or an aspect of the OS works the way you like it, then good. If not, it’s a bit tough. The Magic is inherently more geeky and everything has options. Having said that, the options aren’t in your face and are not intimidating for novice users.

The browser, as many have noted, is excellent. I won’t go into detail about it. The browser on the Magic is also good at rendering pages properly, but unfortunately lacks a multi-touch interface. This means you can’t do the pinch-zoom gesture, among other things. Other HTC handsets have multi-touch interfaces, though.

A minor annoyance with the iPhone is that it has to be registered with iTunes, and must be connected to iTunes when you want to update the firmware. It might not affect most people (especially if they already use iTunes for listening to music), but it could be annoyance for those who don’t want to install an unnecessary music player, and especially for me, as I had to build a Windows virtual machine to install iTunes. In contrast, the Magic simply receives its updates over the air, using 3G or wifi.

I prefer the feel of the Magic in my hand over the iPhone. The Magic is a bit smaller, a bit lighter and a nicer shape, I think. Doesn’t make a huge difference though. By this point, I’m just nitpicking.

Both devices have good screen, good onsreen keyboards and generally similar. The iPhone is a bit slicker, but I think my favourite phone out of the two is the Magic. I’d like it even more if it had multi-touch, too

Since getting my iPhone 3GS, I’ve been playing with a few apps. Today I tried one called Cyclemeter, which is a GPS tracker and can provide some interesting stats about your cycle rides.

I set it to track my journey to work (Speedwell – Clifton) and was quite interested by the elevation graph in particular. (N.B. this route is slightly shorter than my usual one, since the Bristol-Bath cycle path is currently closed near Lodge Causeway, so I’ve been taking a shortcut on main roads).

I’ve included some iPhone screenshots of my results:

Map of my route to work

Graphs of my route

Key points:

• I start at home, taking the roads
• At 2km, I join the Bristol-Bath cycle path at Rose Green Rd. You can see a dip in my speed where I stop and push my bike through the gate.
• Most of the cycle path is gently downhill towards the city centre
• At 5km, I reach the end of the cycle path and proceed through Old Market. It’s a bit stop-start in traffic.
• From 6km onwards, it’s a steady uphill climb (Woodland Road today, sometimes St Michael’s Hill instead) from about 85m to almost 160m above sea level!