Linksys PLE200 PowerLine AV Ethernet Adapter

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a LAN (Local Area Network) connection wherever there are power sockets around the house? Most of today's "connected" gear is mains - powered. A plug in a socket on a wall. Nowadays Ethernet should be there as well... But unfortunately there is not... How many times have I had a need to connect a device to the home network and simply there was no network socket around...

Of course there is WiFi (Wireless Ethernet). But there are several cons of using wireless...

• WiFi is hackable. Last week during a lazy day I was browsing logs on my home router (the DFL-800 by DLink, highly recommended) and I discovered there was a "guest" MAC address hanging around... Something pretty unusual, as I was using WPA security settings. It took me a while to get rid of the "guest", and to increase security I moved the bar up a notch to the WPA2 level. Since then my Vista X61 WiFi card is losing connection once - twice a day and Windows reports the card has to be reset. After the reset everything comes back to normal, but you see the point:
• WiFi generally is unstable. Not very unstable, but just unstable enough to annoy from time to time.
• WiFi is slow. Yes, it is more than enough to read email and surf the Web and watch YouTube. But try to do a few large file transfers, like moving your library of digital media - pictures, music, videos to a server on your local network. It will take ages over WiFi, especially when you just drag and drop the files between two Windows folders. The protocol working below such a file transfer is synchronous (a lot of handshaking) and simply the little delays on the radio channel (usually undetectable under normal conditions), can effectively bog down the transfer process.
• Game consoles have either poor (Sony PS3) or non existent (XBOX) WiFi. BTW this is insane. The strength of today's gaming consoles lies in connectivity to the Internet and two most powerful boxes just do not have it right. XBOX lacks wireless at all and PlayStation3 has very weak radio and antennas... Poor link performance and poor range. Sony should definitely improve this as this seems to be the only thing I am not fully happy about :).

So here comes the HomePlugAV to the rescue. To quote Wikipedia:

The HomePlug AV standard was designed to provide sufficient bandwidth for applications such as HDTV and VoIP. Utilizing adaptive modulation on up to 1155 OFDM sub-carriers, turbo convolution codes for error correction, two-level MAC framing with ARQ,[2] and other techniques, HomePlug AV can achieve near the theoretical maximum bandwidth across a given transmission path.[1] Key distribution techniques and the use of 128 bit AES encryption are specified as mandatory in the standard. Furthermore, even the interception of data exchanged between HomePlug AV devices poses a "significant challenge" for an attacker due to the adaptive techniques used to modulate the signal between two given points.

The above just means 100Mb Ethernet in every power socket. The only thing you need for that is a HomePlug AV compatible adapter. I grabbed a few recently - the Linksys PLE200 series, around $50 a piece. Fully plug and play - Ethernet on one end and power socket on the other. If you want to set up encryption, you have to use the supplied application to enter appropriate passwords. Otherwise they just work. I tested them with the PlayStation 3 and the difference, compared to WiFi is clearly visible. Pictures slideshow performance is vastly improved - faster loading and more dynamic animations in the "Portrait" mode. And faster startup of movies played off of the DLNA server. Recommended!

Budget computing: The Asus Eee PC

Prices of personal computers are going down. Nothing special about it you should say... Well... in the 1990s I used to say a PC was costing around $1000 - the same price in 1990 and in 2000. Of course in 2000 the machine was a lot more powerful compared to the 1990 one, but basically the things you were able to do with it were pretty much the same... I was an active programmer at that time and all the time I was using a $1000 PC to get the job done.

Today I am a C-level email worker, getting paid to read and write emails and do a little Web browsing... My latest email machine is a dual core, 2GB RAM, 200GB hard drive. Oh yes I could live with a smaller drive but I simply like to have all the stuff with me - music, pictures, and of course documents. And yes I could live with 200MB of RAM, but unfortunately my Vista OS could not... I was living in 200MB RAM space for 5 years on the Windows XP street, but after moving to the Vista street, I had to opt for 10x more. Dual core? Sure, one core is constantly occupied by various application update processes checking day and night if there are new versions available. So there must be the second CPU core to do some productive work...

But what happens if we take a step back? I remember my first Windows XP laptop. It was the Compaq Armada M-series. 650MHz CPU, 512MB RAM (why would you need such a monster? - my friends kept on asking me...), and a 6GB hard disk. Windows XP was a screamer on that hardware. And I paid for that machine a small fortune. Especially the RAM was unusually expensive, as most of the hardware used to have 64MB or 128MB of RAM that day.

Let us have a look at the Asus Eee PC model 701, a $300 subnotebook. 900MHz CPU (underclocked to 630MHz to save on battery life). 512MB RAM. And 4GB flash SSD drive plus a CF slot for another 4 or 16GB... Windows XP screamer spec? You bet... almost. I was tempted to buy one, but finally have decided to wait for the Eee 900 series (a screen 1024 pixels wide is way more convenient compared to 800 one). But really... The Eee PC 701 means you can have a top performing email machine for $300. Budget computing finally delivered. The demand for the Asus is enormous and the machine has created a class of its own. Suddenly Sony and HP are promising their own $300 - range budget laptops. Light, inexpensive, connected. Anyway... who needs 64-bit OS to write a piece of email and read a few pages...?

LinuxMCE : The Ultimate Smart Home

Two weeks ago a friend of mine handed me a pendrive with a LinuxMCE demo video. After watching this video I had a jawdrop I have not fully recovered from till now.... Technically LinuxMCE is an add-on to Kubuntu. It is centered around media entertainment and covers an entire variety of smart home scenarios. And definitely seems to have the most complete vision of a smart home.

LinuxMCE focuses on easy and consistent user interface. So there is an always on, always full - screen media (movies, slideshow) with very clever three button remote control, reflected by a very subtle UI blended on top of the payed media. The buttons are [Media] to control WHAT you are watching (channels, recordings, chapters, cue / rev, ...), [Ambience] to control HOW you are watching (volume, brightness,... up / down) and [Menu] for advanced functions. In addition to the three buttons there are two standard [OK] and [Cancel] and the remote controller is motion sensitive (gyro remote, a'la Wii).

LinuxMCE interfaces (USB, serial, infrared) to various receivers / amplifiers / TV sets to provide really streamlined user experience. Like pop a DVD and the TV turns with proper input selected to play the movie. It can also interface to the ZWave smart home controllers to operate lights and other devices. There is also a clever concept of "follow me", where media roams from one display device to another, following you when you move from one room to another.

I have not had a chance to setup a LinuxMCE on my own, but watching the demo video is comforting enough, when I realize somebody is finally thinking far enough to free us from the complexity of home multimedia introduced back in the 1970's with VCRs equipped with flashing "12:00" displays...

Go to the link above and see for yourself :). My wish? Be able to run it on the Sony PS3 or at least be able to use PS3 as a LinuxMCE thin client.... Then nothing would stop me from installing it...

Speeding Up Windows Vista

Last week I promised to continue the Vista story, focusing on speed. I must admit the speed I have been able to squeeze out of the Lenovo X61 is very satisfying now, with a few exceptions. So let me try to describe the actions I applied (relevant to both hardware and software), step by step.

Software:

• As I pointed out in my first real rant on Vista, the first problem you face when buying a new computer nowadays is the enormous amount of bloatware that bogs down the system. So the first step is to clean up the system. Really the best way would be to perform a clean system install from original Microsoft media, without any demos / trials / other teasers eating your CPU, battery and RAM.
• The second step is to get rid of unnecessary native Vista services. There is a good guide at http://www.speedyvista.com/services.html. I cannot point to anything specific, as what you may or may not need depends on what you use the computer for.
• The third step is to watch CPU consumption when adding new applications or new devices. Example: I added a HSDPA PC-Card modem with a customized connection manager, supplied by the Plus GSM, a mobile network carrier in Poland. After installing the software I found the CPU stayed around 10-20% even when the system was completely idle. Tracing down the software stack I nailed a small application (IPlusChecker.EXE) responsible for this. And all it was intended to do was to fire the main connection manager once you pop in the PC Card modem. The IPlusChecker.EXE was polling the WMI subsystem (Windows Management Instrumentation), causing the drain of CPU resources. Removing it from the memory and from the autostart section gave back the lost CPU power, all I have to do instead now is to fire the connection manager manually when I insert the modem. Not a big deal - just a mouseclick away.

Hardware:

• Make sure you have enough RAM. Generally 1GB is not enough and 2GB is even more than enough (my system consumes around 1,2GB of RAM). But never ever try to run Vista on a 1GB machine unless you really want to suffer for all the evil in the World.
• Consider ReadyBoost. Very cryptic. The X61 comes with so called "Intel Turbo Memory" on board. However it sounds, the principle is not as complicated. Turbo Memeory is just a fast flash drive. ReadyBoost is a concept introduced in Vista to keep the memory swap file on such a drive. I am not sure how much it helps, generally people say it does not help that much, but well... I have this built-in, so why not use it? If there is no ReadyBoost device on the motherboard, you may experiment with USB flash drives, but do pick the fastest you can.
• And really, get yourself a HYBRID DRIVE.
  

Two weeks ago, when I wrote about the Hitachi FDE (Full Disk Encryption) drive I installed in my Vista machine, I was not aware this was a hybrid drive. OK, I knew the new Hitachi drive was 7200RPM, 33% faster that the previous 5400 RPM one. But it seems the NV (Non Volatile) cache being part of the drive is what gives the real boost. After the first system boot with the new drive on board, I traditionally went to the device manager to check the properties of the new drive. There I found the new NV Cache tab telling me the drive had 387MB of flash memory cache on board and the cache could be controlled by the group policy administrators. That means no simple on/off switch. Fire the GPEDIT.MSC instead. Windows Vista offers four group policy settings that are aimed at helping you to control the way that Windows uses hybrid hard drives. Each of these four settings can be found at Computer Configuration | Administrative Templates | System | Disk NV Cache. The description and the settings themselves are very cryptic and counterintuitive. Suffice to say you have to disable all of them to get maximum boost. Vista handles hybrid drives the smart way. Not just using the cache as a pass-through device, but locking in it certain elements of the file system that are very frequently used. As the cache has a near-zero access delay, this mechanism has the potential to speed the overall system operations a lot. And it does. The disk upgrade has been like adding a turbo mode to the system. And because the physical heads are moving less frequently, the overall power consumption is even lower, despite more processing overhead introduced by the encryption algorithms within the drive.

Having said that, I have to admit my Vista laptop is now noticeably faster than the older XP machine. I can only imagine how a fully SSD-based (Solid State Disk) system, like the latest Lenovo X300 would perform... Unfortunately we will have to wait until 2009 for SSD drives of 100GB capacity or more. And I will probably wait for encrypted ones...

Stabilizing Windows Vista

Yes, Vista is the hot topic again. It has been almost three months now and I feel a little bit better with the OS that initially ruined my life. Things are settling down a bit and I can even point to some features I like in Vista :) How about that?

I have got used to the new Windows Explorer features. Still have a feeling they do not behave the way I want them to - I keep changing the view too often, they keep reverting to some defaults with those big folder icons. They must be looking good on a 1080p, 50 inch TV, but my laptop is only 12 inch, so I definitely prefer a more compacted view. And it freezes less frequently. Observing the behavior of the system I nailed down the blue screens and freezes to one certain kind of application - a virtual CD/DVD drive. My Thinkpad X61 does not have a CD/DVD drive, so Lenovo shipped an Intervideo Virtual Drive application to allow making an "image" of a disk on the hard drive. I do not watch DVDs on my laptop (if I did, I would have bought a machine with a DVD drive...), so I uninstalled the application. And voila - Windows Vista stopped freezing (ok, not completely, but the failure rate dropped by at least 90 percent). I do not watch movies on my laptop, but occasionally I play some games and as most of the games implement some sort of copy protection based on the presence of the original game CD, I thought I would be handy to install my faithful Virtual Clone Drive by Slysoft. And just after I started using the Virtual Clone Drive, my Vista started freezing again, the same way as it used to when the Intervideo Virtual Drive was present on the system. And again, uninstalling the Virtual Drive has brought back decent stability. So there must be some system level incompatibility with virtual drive - type applications. I am not messing with that anymore. Will try after Vista SP1...

The second application I have been really missing after moving from Windows XP to Vista, has been the PDF Creator, a virtual, GPL - licensed PDF printer driver, used to create PDF documents out of everything. PDF Creator hist some Vista bump and it officially does not work. There is even a $150 bounty offered, but seems not enough... Yesterday I finally moved to the PrimoPDF. Free and works so far without a glitch... So my reference XP - based functionality is almost restored now...

I promised to tell you what I do like in Vista... OK, the first thing is the Instant Search. It IS better than the Google Desktop I used to use in XP. It is better integrated with the desktop and the Windows Explorer and does not lose the track when the Outlook cache (OST) is rebuilt. So Microsoft vs. Google is 1:0, at least as far as we talk about the local resources and the desktop. And the second thing I really like is how fast the machine wakes up from the standby state.

Did I say fast? Vista and fast? Yes indeed... I am not sure how much the X61 BIOS contributes here, but really I am at my desktop in about four seconds from the moment I press the power button. And that includes authentication via the biometric fingerprint reader. I also like how it handles wireless (WiFi) connection after wake-up. Seems it does not refresh the IP settings from DHCP... just behaves as the old ones are still valid... so after the abovementioned four seconds, the WiFi connection is pumping data... Something just not achievable on Windows XP... Accesspoint association and DHCP refresh itself used to take at least 10 seconds...

I think I have learned about Vista quite a bit during the three months of 20 hours spent with it every day... It is a bit like driving a new car... First thing you usually don't like it... Things are different and less predictable... Then you get used to it, learning how it handles and in the end it becomes your old car and you have to like it, want it or not... there is no going back...

Next week I will tell you how to make Vista run even faster. I did it last week. So stay tuned :)