The application seems to work pretty well, even on my laptop that is supposed too under-powered according to their system requirements list. Video is a little glitchy, especially HD content, but I can see that my laptop’s cpu (dual-core 1.2ghz ULV Intel U7600 processor) is pretty much pegged so that’s probably the cause. I’m also using the wireless adapter on my laptop instead of a wired connection but that doesn’t appear to be the problem. It took some poking around but there is a way to point the dtv2pc app at a different DVR - it’s in the “Menu->Settings” menu, you can pick which “server” to connect to. It shows them by receiver ID, which isn’t terribly friendly, so you have to make a mental note of which is which, and you have to use the up/down arrow keys to pick the dvr, the mouse doesn’t make the selection. Switching DVR’s causes the dtv2pc app to load the program list from the new dvr and off you go.

I tried using the app from a remote network, with a vpn connection back to my home network, but the dtv2pc app fails to find the dvr’s. I fired up wireshark to see if I could tell why, and discovered that at startup the app multicasts for the dvr’s, so since that multicast traffic doesn’t get forwarded over the vpn link it’ll never be able to see the dvrs. That is probably a solvable problem with some network hacking but it’s not something the casual user could manage, and I probably won’t bother but it may be possible to get this thing to work remotely ala slingbox if you’re willing to invest some time to get multicast forwarding over vpn to work. I did find that when switching back and forth that at some point one of my dvr’s started reporting that it had no recordings, although it correctly showed only 6% of space available. Again with wireshark, I found the dvr was returning an error when the dtv2pc app requested the program list. I figured I’d probably have to reboot the DVR but it eventually fixed itself, although I don’t know how long that took, it was just working the next morning when I looked at it again. Everything on the DVR itself was working fine, it was just the remote dtv2pc app that didn’t get a program list.

By the way, it looks like the app uses http conversations with the dvr to get it’s program lists and other data. It might be interesting to spend some time sniffing to see what info might be available, I could see maybe writing a script to track which shows get recorded and put the data on a server somewhere. Anyway, that’s all for now, more later when I have time to dig into this more.

Guess what… IT DOESN’T WORK. Big surprise

I downloaded the application, gave them my email address and they sent me an activation code. When installing the app it asks for a serial number, which I assume is the activation code, copy and paste that code into the installer and off it goes.

When I first started the app after install completed it found my DVR (wow, I thought this might actually work). Then it asked me to activate the program, I click the “Activate” button and what happens? Error: Invalid activation code. And guess what, there’s no way to re-enter the code, just a “try again” button. How fucking stupid is that? Turns out the only way to enter the code is in the installer. So I tried a couple more times, even downloading the software again so I could get a new code, same problem each time. I tried hacking their config files, sniffing the traffic to see what it’s doing (it turns out it uses https to talk to the registration server so that didn’t help much), and poking around the registry, no luck.

Gee, it must be true, DirecTV is completely inept, they can’t even issue a valid activation code for their software. To be fair this application is from Cyberlink so I guess they must be equally inept. Thankfully they finally gave in to all the complainers and signed a new deal with Tivo so maybe this time next year things will get better.

Somebody wake me up when the morons are no longer running the world….

Fast forward to the next morning…. Now the Directv2PC app manages to get through it’s activation step, the activation servers must have just been down last night or something. It now will connect to one DVR and play content saved on that box using roughly the same menu as shown on the DVR itself. I don’t see a way to tell it to switch to my second DVR, and don’t have time to play with this much more at the moment so I’ll have to fiddle with this and post more later.

You can download the Directv2pc application here.

My first impression: WOW, this thing is really a lot smaller and lighter than the E61i, and the mechanical design is awesome!

Nokia E71

According to Nokia’s spec sheets the E71 appears to be just a little bit smaller than the E61i, but those small differences are deceptive, this phone looks and feels about half the size. The screen is a little smaller, the keyboard is smaller (removing the space between keys and a couple keys on the bottom row), but neither seems to make much if any difference in the usability of the phone. This thing now fits comfortably in my pocket instead of making a big square bulge, and with the reduced weight it feels like it’s not even there. But don’t think this is some wimpy flimsy phone, it feels rock solid, with a metal back cover and upper/lower covers. The keys have just the right amount of resistance and solid feedback.

E71 Side View

Aside from the smaller size, the real win with this phone is that it is finally a Nokia 3G phone for the US GSM market in their business/enterprise line. The E61i was technically a 3G phone, but only for the frequencies used in Europe, so in the US it worked only with the Edge data service. The faster data service should make email, web browsing, and all the other data applications I use a much better experience. Even if everything else works exactly the same as the E61i the smaller size and faster data will be well worth the $420.

The E71, according to Nokia’s spec sheets, is just a bit smaller than the E61i (4.49 x 2.24 x 0.39 in for the E71 versus 4.61 x 2.76 x 0.55 in for the E61i, and 4.47 oz versus 5.29 oz). That’s an almost 20% weight reduction and almost a half-inch of width, which is pretty amazing given that they did this with only a relatively small reduction in the screen size, and the elimination of just two keys from the keyboard. The difference in thickness is really a bit more than the specs imply, as the E71 has a bit of a bump-out on the back where the camera and flash live, while the rest of the phone body is even thinner by about 3/32 in.

The smaller screen size might be a concern to some people, and frankly it was to me at first as well, but having now used the phone for a week I can’t say that I’ve noticed it being any different. The applications I use most (mail, google maps, and putty) all appear exactly the same, text is just as readable, and if anything I think the image is a bit more crisp on the E71 than on the earlier phones. For example, when pulling up the Google maps satellite image of my house I can clearly see the plants and my dog in the back yard.

E71 Rear View

The keyboard changes to squeeze out that half-inch of width amount to two things: removal of the space between keys (so the keys on the E71 are directly against each other, there is no inter-key spacing as there was on the E61i and E62) and removal of the right-shift and the dedicated control key. The left-shift key and function key no longer have to be held down while pressing the next key so you can press and release the shift key, the a letter key, to get the upper-case letter, which makes thumb-typing quite a bit easier. The control key is now shared with the ‘Chr’ key. Some of the symbols have been removed from the alpha keys but they are still available in the “Chr” menu.

Nokia E61i

The other keyboard change is to the four function keys on the left and right sides of the scroll key. There is no longer an “Own” key, which has been replaced with a Calendar key, the “Menu” key has changed to “Home”, and the positions of the keys has been juggled around. Three of the four keys are programmable for both short and long presses, while the “Home” key is not programmable and behaves pretty much the same as the Menu key used to except that now a single press of the Home key returns you to the active-idle screen. Holding down the “Home” key still brings up the task list.

The tighter keyboard takes a little getting used to since you have to be a little more precise with your thumbs to avoid hitting the wrong key but after some use it seems like my typing on the E71 is really no worse than on the older phones. I do miss some of the symbols, such as the parentheses which used to be above the S and D keys, but once you use a symbol in the Chr menu it the phone remembers your most recently used symbols and keeps them at the top so you can get to them quickly.

New User Interface

The Nokia E71 sports an updated user interface and a few notable added features which really improve it’s usability. The new UI changes the “Home” screen to add an option of showing new mail updates for two mailboxes instead of just one.

Home Screen

System Menu

The application shortcuts list got reduced from 7 to 6, presumably due to the smaller screen size, so I had to drop one of my most-used applications from the list, but it turns out that since there’s now a calendar key next to the scroll button I didn’t lose anything by removing the calendar from my application shortcuts.

The system menu look has also changed a bit, and adds a cool new feature which puts a small round image on each icon which contains an application that is currently running. As you can see in these screenshots I had the call log open, in the Installations list I had the Screenshot program open (obviously, that’s how I got the screenshots) and I also had Mail (in communications) and the Music Player (in Media) open.

Office Menu

Installations Menu

Nokia includes a few basic themes, but it’s really clear that I’ll need to go hunting for a better theme or create one of my own. The stock themes are OK but I’ve noticed a few cases where the contrast doesn’t work out well and it’s hard to see the pointer/cursor. More on this later hopefully.

Mail Applications

My most-used application on this (and any) phone other than the phone function is the email application. I use IMAP for my personal email account, and Nokia’s Mail for Exchange for an account on one of my customer’s networks. As you’ll know if you read my posting on the E61i I’ve had some issues with the IMAP client doing stupid things and I had high hopes for a better IMAP client in the E71. Well, both the IMAP and Exchange clients behave pretty much the same as with the E61i, which means they work most of the time but have some quirks which can be a little annoying.

The IMAP client still appears to not recover from connections which get lost while it’s in IDLE mode. I’ve only had a chance to do a little analysis but it appears that while my IMAP server sends heartbeats every couple minutes, the phone does not notice when these heartbeats stop. The result is a hung connection which sometimes can be manually killed with the “Disconnect” command in the mail client or by killing the active data connection (via long-press of the end-call key). I’ve not yet had the mail client lock up completely like it does on the E61i but I also have not used it enough to necessarily have encountered the case where it would lock up.

The Mail for Exchange (MFE) client appears to behave the same as on the earlier phones. There still is no progress indication so there is no way to tell if the client was able to contact the server, or whether there was just no change to the mailbox. There is no error indication when it is unable to contact the server. Since MFE seems to have no real benefits over IMAP for mail (unless you also want to sync your calendar and contacts, which I don’t) I’ll probably switch to using IMAP just to get some progress info from the client. Exchange 2003 does not support the IMAP IDLE command and the IMAP client seems to deal with that, I think Exchange 2007 is supposed to support IDLE. I’ve had issues with Exchange dropping idle IMAP connections far too often but that’s not the phone’s fault, it appears to be just a crap IMAP implementation from Microsoft but it’s tough to say for sure where the real problem is, it could be a combination of issues (including proxy servers, firewalls, etc.).

Mail Retrieval Settings

I have found a workaround for my biggest problem with the Nokia IMAP client. The IMAP client downloads the complete folder list each time it connects to the server. On a slow network this can take a really long time, sometimes it takes a couple minutes on an Edge network for me to get to the point where I can read my mail. I don’t subscribe the phone to any folders other than the Inbox so I don’t care if it has an updated folder list. I’ve said in the past this should be configurable or only downloaded when in the “subscriptions” settings menu. Almost accidentally I found that the phone can be configured with a bogus folder path, which causes it to try to list folders in a root that doesn’t exist, so only one IMAP LIST command is required to complete the folder-list operation.

IMAP4 Folder Path

There is a setting for “IMAP4 Folder Path” which defaults to “Unix path”. This default setting results in the phone sending IMAP “LIST” commands to walk the entire folder hierarchy one folder at a time, which can be a lot of LIST commands if you have a big folder tree as I do. I discovered that changing that setting to something that doesn’t exist, for example “None” works around this problem by making the phone list something that doesn’t exist so it gets back a response from the server which ends the series of LIST commands.

This simple change makes the IMAP client 1000% more usable, and while I contend this is a flaw in the Nokia IMAP implementation at least now I know how to deal with it.

IMAP4 Folder Path Fixed

The Nokia IMAP client still needs to do a much better job of dealing with connection problems, by checking for the server to be alive and recovering dead connections. It seems like it should be fairly easy for someone to dig into this and make the IMAP client more resilient. I’ll probably try to file a bug report on this stuff with Nokia again if I can gather enough supporting information. Anyone got a Wireshark port to Symbian?

Music Player

Music Player Home Screen

The new Music Player application along with the addition of a high-capacity micro-SD slot and a standard 2.5mm headphone socket make the E71 a viable replacement for your MP3 player.

I downloaded about 4GB of MP3 files onto the 8GB micro-SD card via a bluetooth connection to my Linux laptop, which took about 6 hours so if you care about transfer speed you might want to use the USB connection instead, I just let it run over night. Once the mp3 files are on the phone’s memory card you just have to start the Music Player application and pick “Refresh” from the options menu. It quickly scans for music files on the memory card and adds any new ones to it’s index. Surprisingly this went really quickly, taking maybe a minute or two to index the 888 files I had downloaded.

Music Player

Once the index is built you can play music by artist, title, genre etc. based on the data in the song tags. You can also build playlists, and presumably download playlists from a computer, although I haven’t taken the time to figure out the playlist format. It would probably be a lot easier to build complex playlists on a computer and download them so I’ll probably check into this soon. The music player also has all the typical features such as shuffle and repeat, and it even keeps track of recently-played tracks so even in shuffle mode you can go backwards through the tracks already played in the right order (some mp3 players don’t do this so going backwards is just as random as going forward in shuffle mode).

Music Player

Naturally the headphones which ship with the phone are pretty crappy so if you care about the sound of your music you’ll want to use some good headphones. Most good headphones use a 3.5mm plug so you’ll need an adapter. Luckily Shure recently released a great new product, the Music Phone Adapter, which for about $40 plugs into the 2.5mm socket on the phone and has a 3.5mm socket for your headphones to plug into. It also contains a microphone and a single button which allows you to make and receive calls using your headphones. The Nokia E71 works well with the Shure MPA-2B.

The sound quality from the E71 is pretty good, although at low volumes there is some noticeable audio hiss when I use my Shure E500 headphones, but that hiss is barely evident when using the stock cheap headphones. These Shure headphones have really good audio quality but at the cost of also accurately reproducing the amplifier noise and other flaws from the source. I’ve used them with several MP3 players and other devices and I always hear audio noise that is often not noticeable with cheap headphones. But, turn up the volume a little and the sound really pops, easily overcoming the low-level noise.

And More

This phone does a ton of other stuff, I’ve barely touched the tip of the iceberg in this review. There are features to play podcasts, upload camera images directly to web sites, etc. The QuickOffice application and the Adobe reader tools allow you to create, edit, and print documents. And tons more. As I have time explore some of these other features I’ll add updates to cover them.

Since my web site has been sadly pathetic for so long there are very few links to it from other sites, so it’s almost like starting up a virgin web site (even though jeff.com has been around since about 1992). Prior to today it was getting between 80 and 200 unique visits per day, mostly just to the home page, with just a handful of people drilling down into the rest of the site. Now that I’m adding a little more content it will be interesting to see what happens over time.

Adding Google Adsense ads was pretty easy. Signing up for an Adsense account takes a couple days, I guess Google reviews new applications before issuing the accounts. But once that’s done getting the actual ads to work is easy. The first thing to do is follow Google’s instructions for setting up your Adsense account, including setting up a few ad formats (called “units”) and copying the code they provide for each.

I use Wordpress now to publish this site so I went about adding the ads in two different ways. First, I wanted to put a “tower” ad box in the right sidebar of my customized Wordpress theme. But, I didn’t want any ads to appear on my home page, or on the photo albums and other stuff that I had just copied from my old static web site. Second, I wanted to sprinkle ads into the content of my blog postings and such, since that’s probably where any interesting (if you can call it that content will be. So I had to modify my site in two ways.

Putting a Google Adsense Tower in the Sidebar

The Wordpress sidebar in my theme (and probably most themes will be set up similarly) is defined in the “sidebar.php” file in my theme directory. It really just boils down to an unordered-list of items, so adding to the bottom of the list was easy, I just had to add the code:

<?php /* JEFF: add google ad tower */ ?>

<?php /* If this isn't a static page */ if ( !is_page() ) { ?>

                        <li>

<script type="text/javascript"><!--

google_ad_client = "pub-123456789012345";

/* 160x600, created 7/19/08 */

google_ad_slot = "12345678";

google_ad_width = 160;

google_ad_height = 600;

//-->

</script>

<script type="text/javascript"

src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">

</script>

                        </li>

<?php /* end of is_page */ } ?>

All the javascript code is just copied from Google’s Adsense page after creating the ad unit. The only important thing here is the PHP block which encloses the javascript inside a conditional statement “if ( !is_page() )”. In Wordpress, is_page() will return true if the current page is one of the site’s static pages (ie, not a blog page or posting or one of the pages automatically-generated to contain blog entries in the archives, categories, or other lists). Since I didn’t want ads on my home page and other static pages I exclude those from getting the ad display code. There is also a function is_home() which is useful, but a little misleading, in that it returns true if the current page is what Wordpress uses for the most-recent blog postings. In my case this is not my home page, I use a static page for my home page, so here is_home() returns true on my “Ramblings” page, which confused me a little until I figured out what it was doing.

After adding this to the sidebar.php file the ads started showing up, and I went back to the Google site to set the background color and border color so it matched my sidebar colors from the main stylesheet.

Sprinkling Google Adsense ads in the Blog Content

A while back when setting up Wordpress (and one of the reasons I decided to use it) I discovered a Wordpress plugin “All in One Adsense and YPN” which will automatically insert either Google or Yahoo ads into the site. I had installed the plugin already (which just entails unpacking the zip file into the wordpress plugins directory) so all I had to do was activate it and enter my Google ID number. I fiddled a bit with the settings and eventually settled on just a couple small ad boxes, which it inserts randomly in the content. Sometimes it ends up picking funky places to put them but it seems to work pretty well most of the time.

Like with the Tower ad I adjusted the colors to match my theme. Remember also that Google limits the number of ad displays you can have on one page to three, so including my tower ad I had to set the number of ads per page to two.

Adding Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a really cool tool which shows an amazing amount of data, graphed in many different ways making it easy to learn a lot about web site traffic. I’ve used it for corporate web sites that I manage but never one that I had total control over, so adding it to my own site gives me a chance to be able to fiddle with the site to see how changes can effect traffic.

Adding Google Analytics is even easier than adding the ads. Like the ads it just involves adding a snippet of javascript which Google provides, to each page on your site. My theme uses the same footer for every page, so I just added the javascript code to the footer.php file right before the </body> tag and that’s it, now Google is collecting data on my site’s activity.

Results

Now I guess I just have to wait and see what happens. I don’t really expect to make any money from these ads but I will be very interested to see what sort of view and click-through rates these things get. It seems like the click-throughs must be pretty darn low, I don’t think I’ve ever clicked one of those ads on someone’s site, but we’ll see. The first ads that showed up were for some guy “Jeff Buckley”, who must be a musician or something, but I’ve never heard of him, who the hell is this guy?

For the 6 months or so prior to getting this phone I had been using a Nokia E62 that I bought from Cingular (now AT&T). I could tell that phone had great potential, unfortunately Cingular apparently neutered the software which, when combined with their really bad (edge) data network made the thing nothing much better than a giant steaming pile of dog shit. I eventually got fed up and found that Nokia had released the E61i with a faster cpu, so I bought an unlocked, non-neutered version from buy.com which turned out to be a good move, and I’ll never buy an advanced phone from a cellular company directly again, the baggage just isn’t worth the few bucks you save.

The E61i is a Symbian S60v3 phone with a full keyboard, color screen, 2mp camera, and scads of other features. It is a 3G phone but only for the frequencies used in Europe, so in the US it works only as an Edge data device. My primary criteria for choosing a phone is really just based on what I need to allow me to do my job, ideally without having to lug my laptop around everywhere I go. This means I need an email client, SMS messaging, web access, and an SSH client. This phone can do all of this (with the help of some third-party software) and much more.

The E61i’s IMAP mail client works well enough, and supports a few key features which make it really the right thing for the job: It can make SSL connections to my IMAP and SMTP servers, and it can use my personal certificate to authenticate to the SMTP server, which allows me to securely send and receive email from anywhere in the world using my personal mail server. After some use the certificate authentication turns out to be a bit of a nuisance because each time I send an email I have to type in the unlock code for the security device so it can open my certificate. It would be nice if there were some way to unlock it and leave it unlocked for a period of time (or until idle for some period of time) so I could send several emails without having to type my unlock code for each message. Importing the certificate is as easy as copying the PKCS12 file to the phone (or emailing it to yourself to get it into the email app) then opening it, the phone will ask for the certificate password and add the certificate to your personal certificate store. If you have not already set up the security device it will prompt you through doing so. You may also have to import a CA certificate if your personal cert is not signed by one of the built-in CA’s, just download the CA cert in DER format (with a filename ending in .cer) and open the file on the phone, it’ll import it into the CA certificate list.

The Nokia IMAP client has a couple really stupid implementation flaws which can make it a bit annoying, particular in fringe coverage areas.

• The IMAP IDLE implementation never checks to see if the server is still alive. It will just stay idle forever waiting for the server to send an update notification. This would be fine if the network were as reliable as your home network, but AT&T’s cellular data network is about as far from reliable as you can get, and the IMAP implementation should take that into account. So the phone just waits, never notices that the server connection is actually gone, forever waiting for something that will never happen. The correct implementation would IDLE for a few minutes, maybe 5 or 10 minutes (or better yet a configurable time), then drop the IDLE and send a NOOP or some other IMAP command to check that the server is really there. It could then either go IDLE again if there server is still alive, or close the connection and open a new one if not. The IMAP IDLE specification in RFC 2177 recommends terminating the IDLE at least every 29 minutes, but even that is way too long for an unreliable network connection particularly where the underlying tcp stack doesn’t reset the connection and there is no keepalive provision.
• The second annoying problem with the Nokia IMAP client is that it downloads the entire folder list every time it connects to the IMAP server, even if it is configured to look only at the Inbox folder. Again, this wouldn’t be a big deal on a fast reliable network, but on a slow unreliable network it results in a lot of packet overhead which can delay the connection startup for as much as a few minutes. I did some network analysis to compare the Nokia IMAP client performance with Thunderbird and found that it took Thunderbird 39 request packets to open a connection and completely download my Inbox, while it took the Nokia client 284 request packets (I have a pretty large folder hierarchy). Again, not a big deal on a fast network, but horrible on a bad network. There is already an option to select folder subscriptions which includes an option to download the folder list, there is no reason to download it every time a connection is established.

If Nokia could fix these two problems (both of which should be really simple to fix) and do some work to make the mail application recover from errors better, the IMAP client would be plenty adequate and would perform well. As it stands it’s passable for periodic use and it beats carrying a laptop around.

There is also an Exchange mail client, which uses Microsoft’s ActiveSync to talk to the Exchange server. This ends up working about the same as the IMAP client but doesn’t have the problem of downloading the whole folder list at startup (maybe because it doesn’t support folders other than the Inbox). It also suffers from connection reliability problems, often not recovering well from network issues, and there is no progress bar or other indication that it’s actually doing something so you have to just trust that it’s working. There also does not appear to be a way to make it not alert on new message receipt — the sound can be set to nothing but the phone will still vibrate when in pager mode and there is no setting that I can find to disable it. The flip side is that Exchange 2003 doesn’t support IMAP IDLE and AT&T’s network proxies have really short connection timeouts so the IMAP connections get killed all the time.

The Nokia web browser works well enough, although the version in the E61i doesn’t do some of the things that the latest web sites need. For example, it won’t play YouTube flash videos, and it crashes when I try to open the Wordpress editor to work on by blog. I understand the next version is supposed to have better flash support, we’ll see. I usually just use it for reading news articles and testing to make sure my web servers are up so it’s not a big deal for me that it doesn’t do everything under the sun.

There are some very useful applications included with the Nokia E61i phone basic software package, including an Acrobat reader which seems to work well (I’ve yet to find a document it couldn’t handle, but I do not use it extensively), the QuickOffice suite which will open Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents for viewing. I think there is an add-on package or license which will allow editing of those documents. I’ve used it for viewing docs and it works fine. I might use an Excel-like program for keeping track of my golf score or something, but it hasn’t been an issue yet so I haven’t bothered to look into it.

The phone also claims to support an IPSec VPN client, I went as far as to download the instructions for setting it up but have not yet gotten around to trying it. The only reason I’d need a VPN client is to manage a few windows machines, but I do so little windows work that it just hasn’t been an issue.

In addition to the stock software there are some third-party apps which really make this a full-function device:

Putty SSH client: The SSH client allows me to connect to the networks I manage with a small terminal client to tweak settings or diagnose problems. I can get to all of the Linux and Solaris servers I manage, and all the switches and routers and other devices, no matter where I am. I’ve even fixed network-down critical problems, taking just a few minutes out of my golf game It requires running PuttyGen externally on a windows machine (or the equivalent with openssh) but once the keys are downloaded to the phone ssh key authentication works. The latest version adds the ability to define a list of servers to connect to, each with it’s own settings profile, just like the windows putty client. This one tool alone makes my life a ton better and lets me get out to the golf course far more often than I would be able to without it.

Google Maps: The mobile Google Maps client is now a native Symbian application and works great, including real-time traffic data for many areas. The maps and satellite images download quickly, it has a great search capability, and the maps are actually accurate. The latest version also includes a cellular-based location feature for phones which do not have an internal GPS receiver, or will use an internal or Bluetooth GPS receiver if one is available.

Gmail: The Google Mobile GMail client for Symbian is actually a Java program, which makes its startup a bit on the slow side but it works well once it’s started. I don’t use it much but it seems to work well.

IM+: From Shape Services, the IM+ instant messaging client will connect to all the major IM services, just like Pidgin or Trillian on a linux system. I have my yahoo and google accounts configured, it automatically connects, has all the normal send/receive functions, allows customized sounds for the various events, etc. I don’t use it a lot but it works well. This is not a freeware product like the others but the low price is well worth what you get for it, and they regularly release new versions with added features.

Remote Desktop: Also from Shape Services, the TSMobile program is a java package which runs the RDP protocol so you can remote desktop into windows machines. Not surprisingly this is really sluggish on an Edge connection, and the keyboard interaction is sorta funky, but it works in a pinch and is worth the $35. I use it in combination with some ssh tunnels to get into windows servers even when they are behind firewalls, but the ssh stuff gets a little hairy and I can really only do it because I have a Linux server on a public network that I can bounce the connections through.

There is an OpenVNC port to Symbian, which I’ve tried to use but had issues getting the mouse to work right. The VNC image works well, but without mouse support it’s not very useful. This could very well have been my problem, I didn’t get very far trying to figure it out and decided it didn’t really matter.

The E61i’s camera works pretty well, the image quality is quite good considering the small size of the image sensor and lens. I see a lot of people complaining about the quality of cellphone camera images, but I don’t really expect that any cellphone with a tiny image sensor and fixed lens could ever compare to a real camera. It seems to me that if you want really good quality images, you should use a real camera. A cellphone camera is useful for random photos and off-the-cuff stuff but come on, who really expects to use their cellphone to take professional quality pictures?

The color display is remarkably good even in bright sunlight, and it’s plenty bright with it’s backlight at night. The only issue I have with it is common for most LCD displays: the polarization on the display panel ends up conflicting with the polarization in my sunglasses, at certain angles the display appears to be just black. Turning it a quarter turn gets rid of the problem.

I’ve tried playing with the IPhones, and they’re cute and all but I just can’t type on the things. I use ssh from my cellphone a lot, no way could I survive with a cutesy phone with no real keyboard.

At the end of the day, the biggest problem with this phone actually has nothing to do with the phone itself, it’s AT&T’s crappy data network. I know it’s tough to build good huge networks, it’s what I do for a living, and I realize that the cellular network is going to be flakey sometimes by its very nature. But some things are inexcusable, like way-too-short connection timeouts, broken proxy servers, and broken DNS servers. I had hoped that the onslaught of traffic from the first IPhone release would either coincide with a network upgrade from AT&T, or would result in so much bad press and complaining customers that they’d be forced to fix it. Unfortunately I haven’t seen either happen, and now a year later the IPhone-3G is released and I find myself again hoping that AT&T will have either a fix in place, or be forced by market pressure to do something about their network. It works, yes, but run a head-to-head comparison using something like a youtube video to compare AT&T vs. Verizon and it seems that VZW kills AT&T pretty cleanly. But, AT&T is the only viable US GSM provider (sorry TMobile…), so for people who need a phone that works both in the US and elsewhere there really is no other choice.

Next up: The Nokia E71, Nokia’s updated follow-on to the E61 which includes 3G support for the US frequencies (both AT&T and TMobile have FCC approval) and the feature pack 1 update to Symbian S60v3. It’s supposed to hit the retail channels at the end of July, I already have one ordered from buy.com.

I did this with a DirecTV HD-DVR HR20-700, and an HP 2510p laptop running Windows Vista Ultimate. It should work more or less the same with any HR20 or HR21 DVR, and any Vista machine with the media components (I think that means home premium or ultimate, vista business probably doesn’t have the media stuff, not sure about the other home versions). The DVR needs to be running one of the latest releases that includes the MediaShare Beta software (otherwise you won’t have the menu item that gets into the shared media area).

(This is still a work in progress, check back for more detail later)

1. Get your DVR on your network. It only has a wired connection, but if you don’t have a wired network there are relatively cheap wireless-to-wired bridges that might work for you. Once you do this, your Vista machine may pop up a notice that your DVR connected to it, if it asks you to allow or deny, choose to allow. Unfortunately this thing only pops up once, I didn’t make a note of exactly what it said and I don’t have a virgin Vista machine handy to try to make it happen again so I can describe it here.
2. Open Windows Media Player (I have version 11 installed, I don’t know if this stuff works on earlier versions). Click at the bottom of the “Library” tab and a menu will pop up, pick “Media Sharing…”. In the window that pops up you may (hopefully) see that it’s already noticed your DirecTV DVR. Check the box next to “Share my media to”, click the DVR’s icon, and click “Allow” to give it access to your media library. You might want to fiddle with the “Settings” if you want to limit what gets shared.
   

   Windows Media Sharing dailog

3. Also in the “Library” menu click “Add to Library…” and make sure any locations which contain your music/video/etc files are listed. Vista seems to populate some things in this list automagically, I suppose as part of it’s indexing. This is probably one of the things that eats up disk IO bandwidth and makes the machine slower than it should be, but in this case it’s probably useful. I added my E:\Music folder manually and it quickly indexed it. It appears, although I have not confirmed, that these “Monitored Folders” are also tied to the folders you tell Windows Media Center to monitor, maybe it’s the same setting displayed a different way. That would make sense but who knows…
   

   Windows Media Player Add-to-Library dialog

4. If you want to share photos, it appears that you have to set up the photo library using Windows Photo Gallery. If you’ve never used it then you’ll just have the dozen or so stock photos that get installed with Vista. If you have photos in your personal “Photos” folder, they will appear here and be shared. If you want to add more folders, go to the “File” menu and pick “Add folder to gallery” and pick your photo folders to add them.

Finally…

On the DirecTV DVR remote, hit the “Menu” button and pick “Music, Photos & More”. You should see “My Computers”, hit Select, it should expand and show the name of your computer(s), pick the computer you want and Select. Pick “Music”, then scroll down to “Folders” and on the left you should see your folders hierarchy, hunt through them and you should see what your shares on the Vista machine allow. It appears that you can share playlists and such as well, I haven’t tried that yet.

You can view the photos in your photo album in the “Pictures” list. If you pick a photo, it starts a slideshow with that photo, and keeps looping apparently forever. It gives you the option of playing music along with it, or you can keep your music playing from the step above.

When you have both music and a slideshow running, use the green button on the remote to toggle the forward/back controls between the photo and music. Use the forward/back buttons to go to the previous/next photo or song.

I tried adding my DVD’s folder to the folder lists in both Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Media Player, hoping to get the DVR to play my DVDs but couldn’t get that to work. I’ll keep trying and update here if I can figure it out. it looks like the Windows media stuff won’t populate the DVD folders into the Video library, probably because they’re full of VOB files that it doesn’t recognize or something. I tried adding Windows Media Player as the default app for .VOB but that didn’t help. It would probably work if you can convert the DVD VOB mpeg streams into a WMV file or something, but I’m not sure what would get lost in the process, probably the DVD menus and such would get clobbered. There is some info in the forums on dbstalk.com about using a transcoding software to make it work, apparently the DirecTV box currently only plays mpeg2 with non-dolby audio. If playing DVDs from an online library via the DirecTV DVR could work, it’ll be the holy grail of windows/TV integration!

It appears that you can set up playlists, both for music and photos, and have the DVR play a slideshow along with your music. This could be an interesting party trick, more later if I have a chance to play with it one of these days.

Unfortunately, while sitting here writing this stuff up, I had a slideshow running and music playing and the DVR locked up hard, had to hit the red reset button and wait the requisite 20 minutes for the damn thing to boot. Even when it’s working right sometimes the UI gets really really really slow. The DirecTV DVR, both hardware and UI, is really a huge step back from the previous generation HR10 Tivo-based units, but that’s a whole other story.

First, you have to ding the windows registry to make Windows Media Center offer a DVD Gallery instead of just offering to play from the DVD drive. Open regedit and edit:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\DvdSettings\ShowGallery

Change the value from “Play” to “Gallery”

Then you have to prepare your content, there are really just a few steps:

1: Get your DVD’s onto the hard drive. There are lots of ways to do this, pick one, you’ll end up with a bunch of .VOB and .IFO files probably in a VIDEO_TS folder. You have to re-organize the folder hierarchy to make windows recognize it. Say you end up with a file hierarchy:

E:\DVDs\Terminator\VIDEO_TS

where you’ve put the “Terminator” DVD files, they’re all in the VIDEO_TS folder. Move all the files up one level so they’re in the “Terminator” folder, and delete the VIDEO_TS folder (it should be empty now). Unfortunately this will break other programs ability to play the DVD, specifically WinDVD requires the VIDEO_TS folder name to contain the dvd content. Oh well, pick one and stick with it I guess.

2: Find a jpeg image you want to use for the DVD cover photo. Amazon.com is a great place to find this if you don’t have one. Save that image as “folder.jpg” in the “Terminator” folder. If you don’t have an image it’s ok, Windows Media Center will make a blank tile for you showing just the name of the folder.

3: Start Windows Media Center, go to the “TV+ Movies” group, where you should now see a “DVD Library”, open it. If you’ve never used this before it probably has a couple sample videos in it. Right-click somewhere not on top of one of those videos, and from the popup menu pick “Add Movies”. Go through the steps to select the folders you want to store DVDs in. In this example you’d pick E:\DVDs and it will watch all the sub-folders. NOTE: this watch-list is not the same as the watch-list you set in the settings menu, which confused me for a while till I found this popup menu.

Once Windows Media Center is watching the right root folder, and you have the individual movie folders set up right, they should start showing up in the DVD gallery.

Here is a good posting with some pictures but missing a couple fine details that I included above:

http://channel8.msdn.com/Posts/Use-Vista-and-Media-Center-to-make-the-best-digital-DVD-library-EVER/

Well, maybe. Jeff.com has been lame-the-same since sometime in the mid-1990’s, a few changes to update pictures and such, but that’s it.

Maybe now it’s time. Ideas are still there, time I never had seems like it might be coming back to me.

No promises, but maybe.

In the mean time…

More or less once a day I get an email from someone offering to purchase jeff.com, some for insignificant amounts, some for as much as mid-six-figures. I’m not interested in selling jeff.com (and it really is used for a bunch of stuff, but invisibly). However, I’m interested in knowing whether other Jeff’s (or anyone) would want to be able to use a slice of jeff.com, maybe just for an email address, or a subdomain for a web site, or whatever. Comment here and let me know. If there is enough legitimate interest I might be willing to spend some time making it happen.

Anyway… welcome to the new-look jeff.com.