Category: personal diary

There are many things that have happened in the digital visuals over the last years, regardless if you are looking at the new games consoles, PCs, or home theatre LCDs, plasma screens or digital projection in general. However, there is the emotionally affective field of audio, where equally interesting opportunities and developments are waiting. In many games there is already some use of surround audio, and in game types like “first person sneakers” (the style of Thief) it is even meaningfully applied to gameplay purposes. But great audio does not only consist of spatial differentiation of soundscape, it also involves high quality resolution and timbre of sound. And to reach that, you need the full sound processing chain, concluding to speakers, to fulfil certain high fidelity requirements.

There has been couple of developments going on in my home lately, as I have studied the opportunities of sound in action. Firstly, I decided to experiment by installing a decent pair of loudspeakers in my bedroom, since I enjoy listening to music while reading in bed. After making some quick compares, I ordered a black-and-dark-cherry pair of Epos M5 speakers, as I really liked their sound when testing it with a Stockfish Records Super Audio CD album (Closer to Music, a sampler worth checking out). The really interesting part is the amplifier, which is a Sonic Impact’s Portable T-Amp model TA2024, which I ordered from a net store, based on some rave reviews. It is really a toy by appearance, very small, light-weight plastic box with only one control knob; but since it has got some people so exited by its sound quality, and it is so cheap, I am waiting to get those M5s connected and make some testing.

Another process was started as my old Philips DVP-720SA broke down (a fault in the optical out, I suppose), and since there was no similarly featured model in Gigantti’s collection any more, I got my money back finally, and now am without a DVD/SACD player and free to invest. After various investigations, there are currently two major candidates left: the first is a Samsung DVD HD950, [see the manual, a 3MB download] which is competitively priced and according to some discussion forums has nice picture (via HDMI connection) and sound. But it appears weak in usability features, and cannot compete with more expensive players in image & sound quality either. The other candidate is Sony DVP-NS92, which is almost double in price, and is so new that I find no reviews, but Sony players get generally higher claims in overall quality, as could be expected, if one thinks what it the common perception of Sony and Samsung as manufacturers of quality home electronics. But I have not made my decision yet; the availability is also a factor. I have several new movies and the entire Peter Gabriel catalog in SACD waiting for the new player.

I am not sure if I am just incredibly unlucky, or if Wi-Fi (WLAN) is just inherently unstable and dysfunctional technology? During the last couple of years, I have bought and tried to set up four different Wi-Fi routers/base stations, and all of them have proved to be failures. First I got a Belkin wireless USB adapter that I used for peer-to-peer connection from my laptop to workstation (very poor performance, no signal if I went as far as to bedroom), then I invested into another Belkin product, a wireless 802.11g router thinking it would be the fix. Hah. For some reason, it drops the connection every 60 seconds or so for a period of c. 15 seconds. But as the system was so complex to configure and I had so little time to troubleshoot it, the guarantee period expired before I could sort out that the problem was indeed with the device rather than with some error of mine. Enter the third device, a Netgear router with its new 108MB speed technology and salesperson’s reassurance that this would certainly solve my problems. Amazingly, it actually worked rather fine for nine months (after I had first spent two hours straight in phone with the Netgear helpline, which by the way connects your calls to India, to set it up). It was only this week that the network suddenly vanished. After some debugging, it became apparent that everything else still worked, but the wireless part of Netgear had failed. Well, there was still some guarantee left, and I took couple of hours off my work to drive to Gigantti where I had bought the machine and sort it out. Oh yes… It is now 48 hours later, and my WLAN is not yet working. I have been instructed to call Netgear helpline to get my router replaced, spent half an hour explaining to the Indian helpdesk person same things over and over, calling to the Gigantti helpdesk, spending time hanging on and hearing them slowly type email to the Gigantti store personnel to inquire them about the situation, driving then despaired personally to Gigantti because no-one (of course) returned to my inquiry, asked by the store personnel to phone back to Gigantti helpdesk, and then finally (grudgingly, and after some testing whether I had indeed diagnosed the failure right) given a replacement product, a Philips SNB6500 which has roughly similar technology like the Netgear device it replaced. The only problem is, that now, after more than six hours tonight spend sorting this out, the Philips is still not connecting to internet. It appears to be unable to acquire a dynamic IP from the Zyxel ADSL modem, even if all the other devices in my LAN are perfectly able to do so. Well, I suppose you cannot always win. It is just surprising to see all these things failing with this 100 % consistency. That is reliability in a way, after all.

A laptop is a very personal thing, for anyone who spends a lot of time carrying it around, starting at its screen and relying it to connect to the world as we know it. My old Fujitsu S-series Lifebook had taken more than three years’ of beating before it started to fall apart to my hands during last six months or so. So it was time to get another one, a task that I usually enjoy (toys, toys, toys), but as I knew how much of my life depends on this damned thing I carry around with me, and what kind of hell it can be when it is not doing things it is supposed to be doing, the selection process became a long, slow and painful one.

To cut the long story short, I made all sorts of compromises, and ended up with an IBM (Lenovo) ThinkPad T43, with a 1GB memory expansion, 15″screen, 80GB disk, and a docking station. Rather than going for optimal design or gaming performance, I had to get a workhorse which would handle all those travel miles, endless meeting rooms, airport wi-fis, and survive couple of thumps while on the road. So, an overall reliability in design, plus battery life and business performance were the emphasis areas. A fun website dontbuyjunk.com at least seems to think I’ve made the right choice within those parameters, in the “mainstream” category.

There are some hiccups, though. We have not been able to get the integrated fingerprint reader working yet so far. There is some kind of security chip inside this machine, but I am not carrying state secrets and need not strong encryption for the hard disk, but being able to replace the login passwords with a slip of my finger sounds like a nice concept. But the security client is having “initialization error day”. Or something.

This is also rather loud. I am not sure why the fan needs to be so busy: when I am having only a Word and few browser windows open, the CPU usage rarely goes above 4 %. But perhaps it is a feature.

Compared to the S-series ultra-light, this is also of course quite a lot heavier. But I am very happy with the keyboard, screen, and battery life (with the extra long-life add-on). And those are after all much of the user experience, how you interface with the services your machine is able to offer you. (My fingers are still automatically going into all the Fujitsu key-map places, damn.)