Don't Panik

Just spend the last two evenings running around the nearby park and more. Looks like I'll need to ramp it up if I'm going to be fit enough for the Yellow mountain in April. Anyways, just managed to upgrade Serendipity to 1.5.2. I've been slacking on this and DP was running on a 1.3.x build for quite a while. Anyways, it upgraded in like 10 minutes so everything looks fine.

I've also just posted photos of the Tras OA children hostel on our ministry blog over here.

What do you do when you start getting a large collection of movies, videos, music and photos? Shuffling around DVDs or audio CDs gets old very fast and if your house is fully wired, you definitely want to also pull content off your PCs, Macs, NAS boxes, USB sticks, internet, whatever. I went with the Popcorn Hour C-200 since my workplace has a couple of their A-200 and S-210 store front units. I chose the C-200 because it had the ability to put in a BD player or two hard drives (2.5" and 3.5").

I've had the C-200 for about 3 weeks now. In a nutshell, the C-200 is still not ready for prime time. It's still too rough a product, doesn't do what it advertises on the box (Yet!). There's pending firmware updates though but that should not be the case for a shipping product. You advertise 10 functions and it should deliver all 10 functions. Firmware updates are good and can bug-fix, polish-up or add new features but to back-fill functions it suppose to do when shipped is wrong. It, however, works for people who are willing to live with the rough edges, quirks but the ability to play a large set of media types. Tested firmware version is 02-01-091113-19-POP-408-000 (19 November 2009). There's a new version released last week but I haven't had chance to upgrade yet.

Here's a summarized list of what works, what needs a bit of work and what doesn't work.

What works:
- Plays almost everything I threw at it. That includes AVI, MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, H.264, WMV, MP3s, JPEGs, MKVs and even complete DVD ISO images.
- Playing media off the hard drive, USB sticks or portable disks work perfectly.
- Good quality playback (can't test the audio properly since I don't have a good audio receiver) but HD content looks awesome. Anything less than 720P pales in comparison now.
- USB ports front and back along with HDMI interface

What needs a bit of work:
- Gigabit ethernet connection seems flaky and unstable. Wired it to a 100mbps switch and it was faster to transfer data across. Go figure!
- Interface is still on files. While that may be the underlying structure and may be used for the technical users, content should be the primary means of the UI. Why should you navigate to the videos folder on your disk and then into the folder named Transformers_HD and then select the appropriate MP4/MKV file to play? Give me a catalog of movies, songs and photos, not a directory structure!
- File-based interface means using it as a jukebox is also quite poor. No shuffle, no selection of genre, artist, etc.
- Photo support and slideshow support is again also poor out of the box
- One or two AVI files had problems and required some patching/fixing in VirtualDub. Not a big issue if you're the one ripping/extracting your own videos.
- Stability. Lock-ups on network hiccups or corrupted videos/images/music is more frequent than it should (I've to hard reboot the unit 5 times so far)

What doesn't work:
- The remote is too laggy. Anything over 100ms is noticeable and the lag can be as long as a second. Don't know if it can be fixed in firmware.
- Size. While the need to be able to accomodate a Blue-ray drive and 2.5" hard drive is good, there's a helluva lot of empty space inside.
- The network services is terribly slow and buggy
- The display panel is totally not viewable/readable from a distance greater than 2 feet.

Conclusion, it's expensive for what it does along with all the rough edges. At this price point (USD 299), I'd expect a much more refined product. Would I buy one again if I had the choice? Not really. I'll probably build a HTPC next

What happens when you break your phone. I mean shatter. Well, whether its covered by warranty or not, you'd definitely want it fixed pronto. In today's mobile, connected, internet world, how is one suppose to have no phone for four to six weeks?

Well, that's exactly what happened to me. With a broken four month old iPhone 3GS, Maxis' reply was simple. It'll be fixed for RM600 to RM700 and you'll get your phone back within six weeks. I'm not sure how certain (I've friends who have had Maxis take up to 8 weeks to get their iPhones fixed) the six weeks was gonna be but it was 5 weeks and five days too many. I expect a 48-hour turnaround at any time for a critical device like this. Otherwise, they better stop billing me anyways.

What to do? I put the word out on Twitter and @thebackpackr came to the rescue (via @zilch) to recommend an excellent iPhone repair specialist (well, he certainly qualifies) and I got my phone fixed (glass replaced with an original part) within two hours. If you'd like to contact him, he's on the Low Yat forums here : http://bit.ly/aZtNVe

Wanted to post this much earlier but didn't have the time to. When it was time to replace all the old wiring in my new home, it made sense to lay enough cable drops to various rooms and areas in the house. I used Cat 5e cabling because I had a box of it lying around. Cat 6 would be better but no point throwing a thousand feet of good cable away. A few hiccups happened for the wiring contractor conveniently forgot to add a drop near the kitchen and dining so those areas will need to be wireless now and means they can't get Satellite TV either via Cat 5. All cables were home-run (star topology) into my "home office" room. I didn't want a standard Rack occupying the space so I turned Ikea-hacker. An Ikea PS cabinet was modified with my dremel tool to mount a 24-port patch panel and patch block to distribute phone lines. Since I had a DSL link, I patched all phones behind the DSL splitter which makes things cleaner.


Data-links were patched to a Linksys (Cisco Small Business) SRW2008 managed gigabit switch which in turn is fed off my dual-WAN Linksys RV042 VPN router. Also connected is a DLink DIR-655 wireless router and a Netgear 10/100 8-port POE switch to power my IP cameras distributed around the house. It all fit somewhat nicely into the Ikea PS cabinet with space for two Belkin power strips fed off an APC UPS with extended run battery. That'll give an approximate three hour runtime for my cameras, broadband and network during a power outage.

Improvements? I'll need to add a few more cable drops for IP cameras sometime this year and since my NAS will be coming soon, I'll probably need another patch panel. I've three data ports in each room, that makes 9 plus my "home office" has 4 ports so I've already used 13. My living room and common area has another four ports so that goes to 17. I've 3 POE ports outside the home (to be increased to 5) so that's 20. My phone line distribution ends up take another three so I'm effectively out of ports! The picture below is not the latest one as I've added a modified shelf to hold my router to make space for a 16-port 10/100/1000 switch below and will be color coding the patch cables for easier maintenance soon.



BTW for those interested in laying their own Cat 5 or 6 cables to connect to Telekom Malaysia's demarcation point such as a telephone pole, here's a quick guide depending if your cables are new or not. Newer cables are usually color coded. Mine are blue/white and white/blue and typically, you'll use the same matching blue/white & white/blue center pair in the Cat 5 cable. The good thing about Cat 5 is that you can carry more phone lines on the same cable using another pair (up to 4) so your one single Cat 5 cable can then be split internally (hence my patch block & patch panel) to multiple incoming phone lines and devices (fax, line 1, line 2, etc). Typically, white/blue (white cable with blue stripes) is the positive cable but do verify with a voltmeter to be sure. In older areas sometimes the color is red and green where green is positive. If you have all black cable, a ridge (feel for it) marks the side of the twin cable that's the positive wire.

p.s. Sorry for the photo quality -- all taken with my iPhone

Lots of great food, good company, cooling weather thanks to the earlier rain and you've got the making of a great time!

These Pork burgers are beep awesome!

Here comes the KL Chan Ceramah Series...

For the photographers: all shot on a 5D Mark II with a 24-105mm lens. Aperture was mostly f/5.6 with shutter speeds ranging from 1/100 to 1/800 with RadioPoppers and high-speed sync flash 2x 580EX IIs and a 430EX II.

While Malaysian broadband is lacking in more ways than one can count, there is yet hope. A certain monopolistic company and their terrible service is all most of us have but if you can actually afford it, SDSL is much better considering the guaranteed transfer speeds compared to best-effort. Best effort in boleh-land is probably equivalent of try-lah. You'll probably encounter download speeds as fast as 100kb/second to about 1kb/second. Yes, it's that variable. Come to think of it, Malaysian traffic is similar. I can take anywhere from 15 to 100 minutes to get to work!

There's yet another option - Metro Ethernet. Yes, many cities in Korean and Japan have high speed Ethernet broadband connections while our fancy broadband is still stuck at the mostly same speeds it launched with seven years ago! Paneagle has it's Metro-E in select buildings and areas and if you can afford it, a certain monopoly's broadband becomes dial-up! This is a 5Mbps Metro-E link.

Check-out my simultaneous download of Windows 7 from the MSDN site and yes, I'm still in Malaysia! Here's the info on my IP address:
IP address: 202.169.29.70
Reverse DNS: [No reverse DNS entry per ns01.paneagle.com.my.]
ASN Name: PANEAGLE-MY-AP (Paneagle Communications Sdn Bhd, Metro-Ethernet & Internet Access Provider, Malaysia)
IP range connectivity: 1
Registrar (per ASN): APNIC

It's really amazing how much junk one can accumulate over the years. Instead of having a garage sale, here's a list of things I have that you can take for a tiny bit of cash. I'm not putting a price on the items but a reasonable offer will always be considered!

Mega-list-of-items (single units unless stated):
- Seagate Hard drive 200Gb SATA
- Seagate Hard drive 40Gb SATA
- Western Digital Hard drive 320Gb, SATA
- Western Digital Hard drive 500Gb, SATA
- Western Digital MyBook 640Gb FW/USB/SATA
- Seagate 4Gb Type II (CF) microdrive
- 1Gb DDR2 SODIMM (Notebook RAM) (4 pieces)
- Transcend 133X 2Gb Type I CF
- Sandisk Ultra II CF 1Gb (2 pieces)
- Sandisk Ultra II 2Gb SD (2 pieces)
- Canon EF75-300 IS f/3.5-5.6
- Wacom Intuos Serial port tablet, 9"x12" (A4) size (USA adapter, can be used with 220-110V converter)
- SMC 7004VBR 10/100 Broadband Router with 4-port ethernet port
- Epson R290 Inkjet printer, including 1 complete unused ink cartridges
- HP OfficeJet 5510 Fax/Copier/Print/Scanner, Color inkjet.
- Dell E1705 Widescreen LCD Monitor
- Logitech cordless desktop 110 (Mouse & Keyboard)
- Asus A8N-VM mainboard with Athlon64 XP2 3800, no ram
- DLink DWA110 USB Wireless adapter (2 units)
- Dlink 4-port KVM Switch
- Dlink DCS-950 Network camera
...
heh, I'll update this if I find more stuff

Well, there's lots of photos to process is one thing but there's also a ton of other work from my real job to the garden to the house. Oh well, short post... since a photo is worth a thousand words (cheapskate, a few thousand maybe).