PC Decrapifier

Crapware is probably a better word for what I used to call bloatware. The software that you can live without. The same software that comes preloaded on your machine when purchased. Eating your CPU, RAM, battery. Eating your nerves when your machine hangs or stalls or takes too long to boot. The problem is now widely noticed and as necessity is the mother of an invention, anew class of software utilities emerges. Decrapifiers.

Computer viruses spawned a wave of anti-virus software products, even entire companies, some of them listed on stock exchanges. Big industry. Then came firewalls. Software fighting against other software trying to get on to your computer and wreck havoc on the desktop. Now we have decrapifiers. Utilities promising to clean your windows machine to the state comparable with Macs. One of them is the PC Decrapifier. It is a good start. No perfect by all means, but good and helpful for starters. And looking at the dynamics of the amount of crapware coming with new PCs, this new anti-software software category will grow fast. Oh how I wish the world was without such developments :)

BTW: I know a number of people perfectly happy with their EEE 901 laptops. Weak CPU, no storage, great Windows XP with Google Chrome on top of it and flying Google Documents. The notebook category has died. Long live netbooks!

Eye-Fi

A few weeks ago I posted an entry touting the entry - level SLR camera, namely the Nikon D40. I am a very happy D40 owner, it serves as my secondary camera and a great learning tool for the family members. We use Picasa as a "cloud" storage for photos and one thing I would really love to have (and have been writing about for a while) is eliminating the PC as a man-in-the-middle between a camera and an Internet photo storage / sharing site.

Last week I have finally found some time to configure and test the new release of the before mentioned Eye-Fi SD card. Eye-Fi is a special storage card. On the outside it looks and behaves just like any other SD card. 2GB capacity may not sound big these days, but it is plenty enough for casual usage. D40 reports it can store some 500 snaps on it, which is more than enough. But the Eye-Fi is not an ordinary storage card. It has a dedicated computer and a communication device inside. Namely an 802.11 b/g WiFi transceiver and antenna. And what it does it automatically uploads pictures to the Internet. Take a picture, wait a few seconds and it is automagically on the photo sharing site of your choice. Provided there is a WiFi network present.

It still takes a while to configure (this is done by plugging it via the supplied USB reader to the PC and running the configuration software). You set up a list of known WiFi networks and passwords, destination targets (be it a folder on your machine or an Internet digital photo service). For direct-to-PC uploads, you have to take care of the firewall software (in my case this required a reboot of Vista OS). And you also have to take care of the camera power settings (to keep the Eye-Fi powered long enough to let it transfer the files). The good news is there are Eye-Fi "aware" cameras coming up (the Nikon D60 is a good example here).

After the configuration is done, everything works as expected. You snap the pictures and they automatically land on the Web. You turn your PC on and the pictures are downloaded to your local folder. It is exactly what the digital photography experience should be for most of us. Seamless and asynchronous. The next step should be digital HD television sets pull down those pictures with a touch of a remote. Beautiful, easy and seamless PC-less world. With concepts like the Eye-Fi it is not that far away.

Power Line Ethernet: Delivered On Promise

Last week I cried out loud my 802.11n hassles. People may wonder why move to faster wireless network at home, but the answer seems to be pretty clear: multimedia. More and more homes are equipped with some kind of a multimedia home server. In my case this is the Infrant / Netgear ReadyNAS NV+. It serves three main purposes:

• Stores my digital pictures (the ones myself and other members of the family snap with our cameras)
• Stores digital videos (mostly satellite TV recordings I collect, like the Formula-1 races)
• Stores digital music (MP3 rips of CDs I buy and eMusic downloads)

All the three types of content go through my laptop. Pictures are copied from memory cards to the laptop, cataloged with Picasa and sent to the NAS. Videos are downloaded from the hard drive of the Dreambox satellite tuner, and then converted from .TS (MPEG-2 satellite transport stream format) to .MPG (MPEG-2 native format) and sent to the NAS. Music goes almost the same way. Each time the laptop does some processing, and then sends the files to the NAS server. Typical payload is several gigabytes. For example vacations pictures collection was about 3GB and typical Formula-1 event (2-hours race) is 5GB. It just takes too long to transfer over 802.11b or 802.11g. Surely I could plug a 100Mbps cable, but I almost always do these things on a sofa with no cables at all. That is the process of storing the content.

And next is the playback process. The most often used playback set consists of the HD Projector and Sony PlayStation 3. PlayStation really excels as a multimedia playback device. Thanks to the DLNA it automatically discovers the ReadyNAS and allows browsing the content (be it photos or videos or music). I love the slide shows. They are so dynamic and pleasure to watch. PlayStation has several playback modes, some with artistic "touch", other dynamically zooming on people's faces. Viewing digital pictures this way is a completely new experience. A reason by itself to snap as many photos as you can. The PlayStation has built-in WiFi, but the WiFi is probably the weakest part of the equation. It is just too slow for slide shows. They are much smoother when running over wired Ethernet. And it is barely enough for video playback. In both cases a wired network is needed for full glory.

But what can you do, when you do not have CAT-5 wires close to your TV and WiFi is not a solution? Try the Ethernet over power line, in it's HomePlugAV incarnation. A while ago I wrote on the Linksys PLE200 adapter. It works without a glitch. But you can plug only one RJ-45 cable to it. And I also needed a second one for the n-TV set top box and a WiFi extender for web browsing. The ZyXEL NBG-318S seemed to be the right fit.

NBG-318S is a three-in-one connectivity solution:

• It is a firewall / router (the router / NAT functionality may be disabled and then it is just a switch / access point).
• It is a HomePlugAV endpoint - on of the switch ports is wired directly to the power line interface.
• It is a standard (802.11b/g) access point

After bad experience with some complex devices I was a little afraid if the ZyXEL would perform up to its promise, but after spending some time with it I can fully recommend it. It just works flawlessly and the management interface is very clean, while still having a professional look and feel. In real life I have been able to achieve speeds between 80Mbps and 150Mbps over power line. Ah and on the other end of the line there was the Linksys PLE200, so yes, the HomePlugAV is really an interoperable standard. It may take some effort to set it up on the Linksys side, and I will post a step-by-step guide on the Tech Bulletins blog soon.

802.11n Failure

My wireless home has now 36 ethernet devices scattered all over the place. The only consistent way to count them is to look at the DHCP status log of the DFL-800 router / firewall that is the heart of my network. And BTW I consider the DFL-800 to be one of my best tech / gadget investments. It is not cheap and learning curve is steep. But it can do a lot and has never failed.

Recently I have decided to upgrade the WiFi to the 802.11n standard, promising much better coverage and high throughput. Actually I have been in a need for both, as our newly finished veranda happens to be out of reach of the old and faithful Linksys WRT54GL. I knew the operation would be dangerous, so I started the whole process studying opinions of early 802.11.n adopters. They indicated I should stay away from Linksys, as their new boxes are nowhere near the classic WRT54GL. So I decided to pick the Asus WL-500W. And soon after plugging it in I found out my laptop (Lenovo X61s with Intel 4965AGN dual band network card) would not connect to the Asus in "n" mode. After browsing the Net for several days I decided to flash the Asus with the DD-WRT firmware. DD-WRT is a solid piece of software, looks, feels and works far better that whatever original you have in your router. But despite my hopes DD-WRT did not solve my problem. No connection in "n" mode again... Next try was the Belkin N1. Belkin has never disappointed me performance - wise. I had little trouble setting it up (it has a bug - when you set up an admin's password, it won't let you connect again), but finally was able to connect... with 1mbps speed... Shame...

Third time lucky I thought giving a try to the Airport Express 802.11n. It connected beautifully, showing full 300mbps rate. I was about to cheer Apple for their flawless superiority when I noticed the important difference in setup. Being dual - band, Airport was operating in the 5GHz band, while the previous two (Asus and Belkin) were "only" 2,4GHz devices. To try things out, I changed the Airport settings to run in the 2,4GHz band. Guess what? No connection.... So it really looks like the Intel 4965agn is the problem. It simply would not work in the 2,4GHz, 802.11n mode. I went through various forums and there is no clear confirmation the Intel WiFi card has "n" problems in 2,4GHz, but that is what my small experiment shows.

Unfortunately I cannot change the card in my laptop and really I would not know what alternative to pick, as the 4965 looks really good on paper. It simply looks the 802.11n is still immature technology, and myself, for the time being, I will be using the dual setup: the WRT54GL for 802.11b/g devices and the Airport Express just for my Lenovo laptop. Both Asus WL-500W and Belkin N1 are going to eBay :)