The Blogg

Yes, I have become an owner of an Apple product thanks to a Christmas gift from my wife. When I replaced my old car I pulled the aftermarket head unit out of it that reads data CDs full of MP3 files, but had decided not to install it in my current vehicle. I was in the process of burning audio CDs to play in it when she decided to buy me an iPod and FM transmitter to be used in my vehicle. What follows is a tale of questionable shopping tactics by my wife, poor decisions by Apple, unexplainable pricing by Target, evil decisions by Apple, and unsatisfactory results from a Belkin product.

My mother-in-law [redacted], so Rachel asked her to pick up a black iPod Classic 160GB. When it became clear that we would not see them before Christmas, my wife went to our local Target and purchased her own black iPod Classic 160GB, with the intent that when we got the one from her mother she would return it using the receipt from the one she purchased. This plan became somewhat murkier when we discovered that not all black iPod Classic 160GB instances are created equal. Specifically, there was a version manufactured from 2007 through 2008 (“sixth generation”) and another manufactured starting in 2009 (“sixth generation, 2nd revision”). The primary difference is that the newer version is slightly slimmer. Although Apple chose to use the same name and model number for two different products, they have different UPC codes and stock numbers. Of course, I had already opened and began using the older model.

Target also charged wildly different prices for the two revisions. Strangely, the older version was sold to Rachel for $350, while the newer one was sold to her mother for $230. Since we could not possibly return the newer version with a receipt from the older version, I reset the older model to factory condition and returned it, the documentation, and accessories to the box, hoping I would be able to explain the situation to a customer service representative. Unexpectedly, Rachel attempted to re-shrink wrap the box using plastic cut from a Ziploc bag and some sort of heat sealing device. It did not look perfect, but close. A Target employee accepted it without question, but I felt terribly dishonest even though it was in as-new condition.

The iPod is designed to work with Apple’s iTunes software, which is fair enough. Since iTunes is not available for my operating system of choice, however, I needed to look into alternative ways to transfer music to it. I would prefer that I be able to simply treat the device as an external hard drive, drop a directory of music onto it, and go, but I understand that having a database of metadata is useful. The gtkpod application looked like a reasonable choice for being as close to what I would want while satisfying the iPod interaction model. Getting it to work, however, was no easy task. You see, starting with the 5th generation of iPods, Apple started attempting to lock them down so that only their software would be able to access the device. Enterprising hackers eventually found a way to fake the application signature by hashing the serial number, but this is a poorly documented, manual process. Eventually I did manage to thwart Apple’s attempts at preventing me from using the device I own in the way I would like.

After having loaded some music onto the iPod, I took it and the Belkin Tunebase FM transmitter on a trip out to Bethlehem. Getting the transmitter to fit into the cigarette lighter in my car was quite a chore; they design it to have a tight fit so that it will not freely rotate while driving, but I had to supply a ridiculous amount of force just to jam it into the socket. The transmitter itself is simply not of high enough power to consistently reach the antenna at the back of my car. If tuned to a frequency on which there is a competing station, you hear a mix of the two sources. If tuned to an unused portion of the spectrum, you hear a mix of your music and static. The device includes what they call ClearScan technology, which is supposed to automatically find a frequency with least interference. In actuality, it seems to do almost exactly the opposite. I live in a somewhat remote area with plenty of unused frequencies, but it always seems to select one of the few on which there is a commercial broadcast. Not that this matters, since I have no particular preference for mixing with static over mixing with other music. It also has settings to apply compression to the sound before transmitting it to help boost the signal, but with modern recordings already super-compressed I found that this had no noticeable effect. There is one way that I could significantly improve the sound, however — holding my hand just above the end of the antenna. With a part of my body in that vicinity the sound comes through relatively clearly. I have not been able to figure out whether my body is being used as a large antenna, or if the radio waves are reflecting off of my hand back towards the car’s antenna, or what. Perhaps someone experienced with RF signals can make a conjecture.

Since completing my general exam last week I’ve been slacking off from work a bit and getting back to one of my favorite computer games: Sid Meier’s Civilization IV. It is unquestionably a great game, possibly as good now as Civilization II was back in its heyday. Still, there are a number of things that I find very annoying about it:

• The notification system fails in significant ways. If I have discovered the location of a resource, lost a unit in a defensive fight, or sighted an enemy unit within my cultural borders, I want to know exactly where it is and be sure that I have dealt with it before ending my turn. A message that scrolls over the map and disappears is not sufficient for this purpose. Many previous incarnations of the series have solved this problem better, but my favorite implementation was in the Civilization: Call To Power game, which was in many other ways rather bad. An area of the screen was dedicated for a list of messages that you could read at your leisure and dismiss as you desired. Clicking on one of these messages would point you directly to the location on the map from which it was generated. The types of messages deemed significant enough to appear in this list was highly customizable.
• I like the gameplay elements added by religion quite a bit, and in fact my strategy in most games revolves around founding as many as possible and using them for their revenue generation and cultural dominance advantages. Spreading religions, especially in a large number of newly captured cities, is unfortunately very cumbersome. As you can automate workers to improve land in whatever way the AI thinks is best, I would love to have automated missionaries with a button that sends them to any city in your empire in which the religion is not present and to which no other missionaries are automatically on their way. If I could set a city to keep building missionaries of a particular religion until it has spread everywhere in my empire, that would be even better.
• The game does not automatically adjust the distribution of specialists intelligently. If I set the output of my city to Research, then any engineers would be more effective if made scientists instead. I suppose you might not necessarily want this if your purpose in having engineers is to increase the probability of eventually generating a Great Engineer, but if the AI automatically decided to create the engineers in the first place, there would be no harm in moving them.
• Running wars is still very long and time consuming. Again, I liked what Civilization: Call To Power did to solve this. You could create groups of units that would attack and defend as a group, so that an assault on a city would consist of a single battle instead of perhaps a dozen. There was also more strategy since units in a group could complement each other, which could mesh very nicely with the promotions tree in Civ IV.
• It would be nice if the Shuffle option for land mass type actually selected from all of the options instead of just four. I have been using it because I do not want to tailor my strategies to a specific game type and then have them be completely unsuitable on the rare occasion that I get to play multiplayer.
• Another automation issues deals with air units. I always thought they were much less useful than in real life in Civ II because you would have to manually move them around each turn in order to see where there might be enemy units. Civ IV improves on this dramatically by making air units have air-specific actions, such as performing a reconnaissance sweep of an area. It would have been much better still, however, if there were a way to set a unit to automatically sweep an area at the beginning of every turn.
• Diplomacy is much improved over earlier games, but there are still holes. When someone asks me for a trade that I find not in my best interests, I decline it without worry that it will substantially hurt my image with the other country. When they ask for something for free, however, I usually give it to them because I do not want to anger them. Do the mechanics actually work this way? I do not know. I think there are still a few things that the AI players can do diplomatically that you cannot, although I cannot think of a specific example at the moment.
• Diplomatic victory makes no sense. In that vote, no player who is not in the running has any incentive to not abstain. If the AI players understood the mechanics, they would never vote for anyone other than themselves. In the real world it might make a big difference to you who gets elected supreme leader of the world, but in the game there are only three outcomes: you are elected and win the game, no one is elected and the game continues, and someone else is elected and you lose.

I am thinking about buying the Beyond The Sword expansion. I do not expect that it actually fixes any of the issues above, but it sounds like it would add some other very interesting features and keep me enjoying the game. Unfortunately, it looks like I cannot buy the expansion on Steam and use my physical copy of the original game. If I do this, I will probably bite the bullet and pay $39.99 for Civ IV, both expansions, and the updated Colonization on Steam. Then again, I now have a system with a modern graphics card, and if I am going to spend time playing games there are many, many others that have been released in the last five years or so that I have missed. Among those that sounded like something I would want to play eventually are Far Cry, Doom 3, Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, BioShock, Mass Effect, Portal, Crysis, Left 4 Dead, Return To Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein, Age Of Empires III, … and those are just the ones I have heard enough about to know I want to play them, and can think of them at the moment. Chances that I play through even a quarter of them in the next several years are low. Should I go for it, or move on?

After much hemming, hawing, and otherwise delaying since first shopping around, I have purchased an ASUS N51vn-X1A. It is basically the same as the MSI model I had been looking at several months ago, but with a faster processor and more powerful graphics card. Below is the review I had been intending to write for NewEgg before I realized they had draconian space limitations.

I placed my order Saturday night, and it arrived Tuesday afternoon. I was apprehensive about buying a machine that had not been reviewed yet, but I could not pass up what should be the best graphics you can get anywhere near this price range. Hey, at least it doesn’t have the mythical 220M that some other laptops here have (nVidia seems to be unaware that they produce such a model).

The machine includes both Windows Vista Home Premium and a small custom OS called Express Gate. Apparently the idea of Express Gate is that you can boot into it very quickly and access a web browser and a few other simple applications. An interesting idea, but I am not sure if I will ever use it beyond this trial. It looks like this is using 11.7G of the disk, which has a second partition (149G) for Windows and a third (137.3G) empty. A free upgrade to Windows 7 when it is released is provided. I was able to install Ubuntu 9.04 on the empty partition and it seems to have recognized all of the hardware, although it hangs when trying to shutdown.

The headphone and microphone jacks are in the center of the front panel. I have not tried to use them yet, but having cables hanging from there certainly seems less than ideal. There is also a button that allows you to turn off the wireless antenna. I do not think I would ever intentionally use this, but I am a bit concerned that I might hit it accidentally. I am surprised to find that the RAM is DDR2, while the video memory is DDR3.

Considering how large it is, the weight is very manageable. I have not tested battery life, but expect it will be rather bad given the beefy components. That’s fine with me; I use it like an ultra-portable desktop. It has not had heat problems for me, but I have definitely not pushed the hardware to its limits yet.

I waited at least 15 minutes on “Installing ASUS applications”, which means I probably have quite a lot of crapware to hunt down. In fact, I have already managed to find a bug, as “Preparing to Uninstall” Norton Internet Security 2009 has been working for 10 minutes without seemingly making any progress, then Windows Task Manager stopped responding when I attempted to open the Services tab. I may be installed Windows XP very soon.

I would like to report that I ran some recent game on high graphics settings, but I do not own any recent game (until 48 hours ago, I had no hardware with a prayer of being able to run it). I did try out CS: Source and got 235.88 fps through the gorgeous looking stress test. Alas, my skills have atrophied severely since the days of daily CS 1.5 play.

A warning from the manual: “DO NOT PUT THE NOTEBOOK PC ON YOUR LAP OR OTHER PARTS OF THE BODY TO AVOID INJURY FROM THE HEAT”. I guess that is why they are careful to always call it a “notebook” rather than a “laptop”. I am afraid I am going to have to ignore that warning at my own peril.

Also from the manual: “The built-in air ionizer functions as an air purifier. The emitted ions purify the air by attracting particles floating in the air and falling to the ground. Press the Air Ionizer instant key to activate this function.” That has to be the strangest feature I’ve ever seen on a piece of computer hardware.

In summary, there are some oddities but it looks like this machine will do everything I need it to.

My wife is required to own a smartphone (which the residency program will pay for), gets a 22% discount at Verizon stores, and was able to get released from her current T-Mobile contract because they do not have coverage in Williamsport. She decided on the BlackBerry Curve 8330, and we went to purchase one and sign a Verizon contract this evening. I intended to join her contract to take advantage of the discount and opt-out of the AT&T plan that I have shared with my family for the past 6 years, getting whatever inexpensive (or preferably free) handset that they would give me.

When the salesman informed me that we could get a second BlackBerry for free with the purchase, and that with our discount a data plan would only cost $23 per month, I caved in. A phenomenon that I feared has already begun: while we were able to live on my meager salary for years, now that Rachel is getting a paycheck it is much easier to spend that extra money on things that would have seemed extravagant last year than to put it all into debt relief.

The ability to send and receive email from virtually anywhere will be remarkably nice, and it appears I should be able to get an SSH client, with which I should be able to monitor experiments, write code, and otherwise work on the go. It is time, I suppose, for me to take up this additional totem of geekery. However, I have so far found the interface to be clunky, the connection slow, and the screen real estate small enough to make doing much of anything tedious. Hopefully with time and experience I will no longer notice these limitations. In the meantime, do you know of any cool/useful things I can do with the BlackBerry? Tethering would have been nice, but requires an additional fee. There is an application store, but it seems to be not nearly as extensive as what the iPhone purportedly has or that I expect Android-based phones to eventually have.

My current laptop (a Dell Inspiron 8600) has been falling apart for quite some time, and my repairs to it have not exactly returned it to factory condition. I’ve been talking about replacing it for quite a while, but actual funding for such a thing may be available soon. Unlike many people, I do not care very much about dimensions or weight; if it fits in my backpack it will be sufficiently small and portable for me. The following are my preferences, ordered from most important to least:

1. I should be able to natively run Linux on it, with good support for all hardware components.
2. I should be able to natively run Windows XP on it.
3. It should be powerful enough to avoid obsolescence in the next five years, but not so powerful that I am paying a premium for cutting-edge technology.
4. It should be durable and as user-serviceable as possible.
5. It should be powerful enough to run modern games, although not necessarily with highest-quality graphics.

Although Apple is getting much closer to my ideals, it still seems silly to pay the premium for their hardware when I have no intention of running their operating system. The only offerings from Dell or Lenovo that meet preference 5 seem to be horribly overpriced, and I’ve not necessarily seen anything from Toshiba that looks attractive either.

I’ve been looking hard at several models from Acer, ASUS, and MSI equipped with NVIDIA cards in the second tier at http://www.notebookcheck.net/Comparison-of-Graphic-Cards.130.0.html, and they are definitely powerful for their price on newegg.com. I’ve only purchased components like motherboards from these manufacturers in the past, but have had no problems with them. I am somewhat concerned that servicing a machine from one of these companies might be significantly more difficult that with one of the major brands.

If you have any suggestions, I would very much appreciate them. I hate making decisions that I am going to have to live with for the next half-decade.

(Updating The Blogg on Williamsport Internet Access)

I really wanted to like Chilitech, but they were unable to provide me with the results of their site survey other than that it passed, and would or could not divulge their upstream provider or other information. The answers to those sorts of question were not all that relevant, but the inability or unwillingness to share technical information with customers led me to realize they were not the kind of company I was hoping for. Since my wife was already firmly set on Comcast, the decision was fairly easy.

I intended to log in to comcast.com, fill up my shopping cart, and then call a representative on the phone. That way I could make sure I got the proper pricing while hopefully arguing my way out of a pointless $99 installation fee for someone to plug in my cable modem. Unlike when I checked last week, however, the comcast website was stating that neither digital cable nor Internet access were available in my area. Not wanting to wait around, I decided to make the call anyway.

The woman that I spoke to was quite adamant that the installation fee could not be waived under any circumstance, so I relented. She also tried very hard to sell me on a “triple-play” package with telephone service (which actually would have cut my bill by about $2/month, but I refused to order a service I would never use) and HD channels (which could not be effectively viewed on any television we own or are likely to own in the next several years). I was not offered a choice between multiple services, and simply got the default cable and Internet packages that she assumed I wanted. The total was $116/month, significantly higher than I remembered. I mentioned that I had seen better prices on the website and she told me that there was no way she could see or match those prices.

Once I got off the phone I tried the website again, and it was working. Through the web interface I could buy Digital Starter cable television at a 6-month promotional rate of $29.99 and Performance cable Internet access at a 6-month promotional rate of $19.99, a total of less than half what I had been quoted. I called back and talked to another representative who was extremely helpful. When I explained what had happened he told me it would not be a problem to match those prices, although I would be downgrading from the Digital Classic television service I had been sold (which includes an extra 100 channels that we would have doubtless ignored). Given the price reduction and his helpfulness, I also ordered a DVR (yeah, I should just be using MythTV, but the wife does not want a computer sitting in the living room) and the Sports Entertainment Pack (mostly for the NFL Network).

Thank goodness I reached a good representative on the second try. If call center jockeys are supposed to never deviate from a script, how can they have such different information? We shall see how well the service works out.

One of my hopes for some time is that when we moved and had a jump in income we would replace the generic RCN cable Internet access with something better. Given that I am going to be telecommuting at least 4 days each week, it is important that data access not get in my way. Unfortunately, Williamsport is much more rural than anywhere else I have lived and there appears to be only two choices beyond dial-up.

Comcast offers cable-based broadband at either 6M / 768k or 8M / 1M for either $62.95 or $72.95/month respectively, with a $99 installation fee. That would be quite a bit better than our current 1.5M / 384k service, but it is not possible to get a static IP address without buying the unreasonably more expensive business-class service. I was pleasantly surprised that the initial salesperson that I talked to was able to more or less immediately escalate me to someone who could tell me that the only ports blocked are 25, 68, 135-139, 445, 520, and 1080. That they would allow port 80 is also a pleasant surprise, though not as nice as if I could get a static IP. Unfortunately, they have a reputation as the scummiest ISP on the planet, overselling their infrastructure, shaping traffic and enforcing unwritten and arbitrary caps below their advertised rate, and employing the worst technical support imaginable. While they might mean “Comcastic” as a positive slogan, the Urban Dictionary disagrees.

A local company called Chilitech offers wifi-based broadband at 3M / 512k for $29.95/month and a $49 installation fee. Every account gets a static IP and there are no ports blocked. My concern here is that there is little information available about the company (no reviews on DSL Reports for example), and the unknown might be worse than the known devil. Furthermore, I am a bit leery of depending on wireless transmission seeing how poorly 802.11b works at times.

If we were to go with Comcast we would get a substantial discount by purchasing cable television as well, which brings the prices about in line. We could buy DirecTV through Chilitech but I do not find satellite television an appetizing proposition either. We will not be using a landline or VOIP, so the availability of those services is irrelevant.

What would you go with?