Category: Geek

My first computer was an Atari 8-bit that could hold 90KB on a floppy disk. Enough for a handful of small games, or one larger game. Since space was so limited, shuffling files around from disk to disk was often needed in order to free up that kilobyte or two here or there for a new file.

The next computer I had was a really old IBM PC, with two 360KB floppy drives and a 10 MB hard drive. It felt like an enormous amount of space at the time and no longer required constant shuffling. As the joke goes though, “the steady state of disks is full,” and eventually the hard drive would get filled after binges of BBS downloading and it would be time to clean up. Since there was more wiggle room to work with, all I would do is walk the directory tree every once in a while, deciding which files I should keep on the drive, which ones I could copy off to floppies, and which I could do without and delete.

As time went on, things remained much the same. Drives got bigger and I could keep more files on the hard drive at a time, but the occasional pruning was still necessary. In order to manage the ever-increasing number of files, I had to organize them more efficiently too, so it was easier to archive or purge whole categories, detect duplicates, etc. WAV files over here, pictures over there, subdivide them into ‘kittens’ and ‘comics’ and so on…

Now, I have 240 gigs of disk space, and things are still much the same. Most of that is video recordings, and I have to be wary of running out of space and so every once in a while I go through and figure out which recordings I can keep, which I can delete, which I can burn to DVD or compress further…

But, I have other types of files, too. The MP3 collection, images, text files, smaller video clips, sounds, etc. The problem is that I don’t find myself going back and sorting and pruning these types of files like I used to. Why not? Well, the main difference between them is that these files are so much smaller than the video files that they’re no longer what drives me to clean up my data. I’m forced to manage the video files because if I don’t, I’ll run out of space fairly quickly and then the PVR schedules fall apart and I have no working space left, so dealing with them is mandatory. If I need disk space, I could sit down and browse through my picture directories for a few hours and free up maybe 20 megs of space, but why bother when I could push three buttons on the remote control and free up 5 gigs of disk space by watching and deleting a few TV episodes instead.

Now the only motivation left for sorting my files is to do it just for organization’s sake, in case I need to find something easily. It’s a habit I’m not used to though and, being lazy, one I probably won’t develop anytime soon. And so, much of my files remain in a rather disorganized state and it continues to get worse as I add new files.

But my collection of Star Trek episodes is immaculate.

Normally I’m not too fussy about the rough, unpolished nature of a lot of free software, but when you’ve been editing for a half hour and accidentally hit the ‘Clear Clips’ option right underneath the ‘Save Clips’ option in the menu and there’s no Undo implemented…

MythTV 0.17 is working out very well so far. It’s definitely far more stable, and I haven’t had any more lockups during playback at all. I have the frontend working on the iBook too, so theoretically I could watch shows from the kitchen or bedroom instead or have two people watching different recordings.

The XP box is sort-of working again — after underclocking it a bit and putting an older GeForce 2 card in, the voltages are back within tolerances and it behaves itself. Unfortunately it then performs like, well, a 3-year-old system with an ancient GeForce 2… Oh well, good enough for now, as I’m mostly using it for DVD burning anyway, and World of Warcraft remains more-or-less playable after turning off the fancy graphics.

You’d think it would be easy to find a new power supply in a big city like this, but no, you’d be wrong… All of the places I’ve checked so far only have either cheap, underpowered, unreliable brands, or hideously overpriced overclocker-geared models. I don’t care if it has modular cables and separate dual 12V rails and LED-backlit fans, I’m not spending more on the power supply than I did on the motherboard and CPU together…

It’s the lack of choice in the regular stores that seems to drive me to order a lot of my parts online instead. It may take longer to get them, but the selection is much better, and usually cheaper too.

The replacement motherboard finally arrived today. I forgot to get some thermal paste for the reseating of the heatsink, but managed to scrounge some from the office.

The good news: moving the CPU, memory, and cards over to the new board and replacing it in the case was fairly quick, and everything worked the first time, for a change. Voltages are looking a little bit better.

The bad news: The hard drive still misbehaves. And for some reason it’s misdetecting the CPU as an Athlon 1800+ instead of the 2400+ it really is, even after a BIOS update, so it’s possibly only running at 75% of full speed right now.

It looks like the bulging capacitor may have been a red herring, and the problem lies either in the power supply or the hard drive itself. Oh well, at least this board is more upgradable than the old one; when it comes time to hand it down to the Linux server/PVR, it’ll either already be good enough to handle HDTV video or could be cheaply upgraded to do so.

Update: I can manually set the FSB speed and multiplier and then it properly shows up as an Athlon XP 2400+…but then the voltages fall even lower than they were on the old board, with the 5V bus showing up as only 4.4V and highlighted in red. Red bad. It may have been falling back to a lower speed just as a form of undervoltage protection. And the drive won’t even spin up after that change. That clinches it — it’s almost certainly the power supply.

One of the (many) things getting people riled up is the upcoming introduction of the broadcast flag on HDTV signals, and what that means for people like PVR users. Any equipment manufactured past a certain date must comply with the broadcast flag requirements, and the flag limits many of the abilities that PVR users are accustomed to having, so you’d better hurry and buy something before that point!

But wait, this flag only seems to apply to over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts. HDTV uses different modulation schemes for OTA and over-cable broadcasts, and the flag doesn’t even exist in the over-cable version. So, living in a place that’s unlikely to see any significant HDTV channels delivered OTA, I’d be getting the cable version anyway, so it doesn’t really matter to me. Whew.

But wait, the cable-delivered signals can be *encrypted* instead, and a lot of places are already doing that with at least their higher-tier DTV channels. You’re thus locked in to needing the cable company’s special equipment to decode it, and their equipment only provides the final video output to the TV set. Although a lot of these cable boxes have Firewire ports, you only get the encrypted stream from it. Since their equipment is in control, it will enforce any additional restrictions the cable company wants to impose, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Grabbing the raw video output and re-encoding it is impractical in the near future simply because there’s so much data (HDTV at 1920×1080 is a lot harder to encode in real-time than plain old 720×480 NTSC. Hell, it takes a 1.5-2GHz processor just to *display* HDTV on a computer), and they’re working on ways to stop even that method in the future.

But then again, this is all based on how the U.S. is rolling out HDTV. The same legal problems don’t necessarily exist up here, but considering how slowly it’s being rolled out (Five boring channels so far! Woohoo!), how much pressure the U.S. can apply, and that most of the equipment comes from the States anyway, it may not matter in the end.

In short, PVR users may be screwed when HDTV finally arrives in full force.

While taking yet another closer look at the XP box’s motherboard, I noticed something which immediately made my heart sink: one of the capacitors, right near the ATX power connector, had a bulge in the top. Dammit. I remembered reading about that story years ago, and this board is from that era, but I thought I’d dodged the problem. Apparently some of those faulty capacitors are still out there and marching towards failure though, as reports continue to pop up occasionally.

I’m not really absolutely certain that it’s the same problem, especially since I’m only seeing one cap with a bulge and reports typically indicate multiple failures on the same board, but it’s possible that only a single bad capacitor slipped into the batch used to build this board, or there are others on this board that just haven’t failed yet. Or it could be faulty for reasons unrelated to that specific story.

In any case, a bulging capacitor that close to the main power source is certainly a warning sign and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s causing problems. The board is long past warranty, and it would cost more than it’s worth to fix it up, so it looks like a replacement is the only real option. Nuts.

After finally getting around to taking a closer look at my XP box’s problems, a couple things pop out:

1) The 5V and 3.3V busses are running a bit low, usually at around 4.5V and 3.08V respectively according to the BIOS monitors. Vcore and the 12V bus seem fine, though.

This is a nearly-brand-new power supply from a good name, so I’d be surprised if it’s failing already. However, I recall reading somewhere that recent supplies tend to favor higher drains on the 12V bus, whereas older systems tend to draw more on the 5V bus. Maybe this supply just doesn’t deliver enough 5V power, expecting most of the drain to be on the 12V bus instead. *shrug*

2) The fan on the northbridge chipset is stuck, and difficult to turn. I have no idea how long it’s been stuck, but at least it doesn’t seem to be causing any harm. The system still works fine most of the time, but overheating due to the faulty fan might explain some of the instability.

So, first I need to fix the fan and see if that helps with anything. If I still have trouble with the hard drive, I’m not sure what else I can do besides start replacing components like the motherboard, power supply (again), and the drive itself.

I really don’t want it to have to come down to that since I don’t really like the choices available right now and was hoping to delay the upgrade cycle a bit longer…

For all the blathering about portable MP3 players I’ve done, you’d think I’d have already bought one long ago, but no, I somehow managed to keep putting the final decision off further and further and further…

I’d previously been interested in the iRiver line of flash players, but at the time there were still concerns over low capacity, high cost, and a confusing mix of features (only some supported acting as a USB drive, only some supported Ogg, and it didn’t seem like any had both). So, unable to find a ‘perfect’ model, the decision was delayed further yet…

After going back and reviewing some of the more recent models though, I discovered the iFP-799, which has pretty much everything: high capacity, long battery life, FM radio, recording capabilities, USB drive support, and at a not-too-bad price. Perfect!

Except for one thing: ordering the frigging thing. It’s not listed at a lot of places, ordering from smaller sites from the U.S. is a pain, Amazon wouldn’t ship it to Canada, and the major Canadian suppliers were either vastly overpricing it or didn’t have any available. NCIX listed it, but wouldn’t even let you backorder it.

Until today. I finally managed to catch it online, in an orderable state, and at an acceptable price, and so *finally*, I have an order in.

It took me damn near forever, but I’ll finally have a replacement for this crummy PocketPC player…