(via Twitter @fraserspeirs, available from Amazon)

My work just bought me a new LG W1942T, which is rated as running at 1400×900, which for a 19″ monitor isn’t that high. My laptop (15″) does the same resolution. It’s possible to run the W1942T at 1680×1050, but I really don’t know if the blurriness is caused by that, or if it just isn’t the best monitor available.

My boss bought a 22″ LG monitor, which is rated at 1680×1050, but it does 2048×1280 quite comfortably. And I have an nice old Dell E172FP, which looks best at 1344×1074, rather than the 1280×1024 which it says it can do.

Anyway, I took some snaps this time.

I wasn’t able to take a shot of the initial boot screen (ironically, it caused my phone to crash. Twice).

This second one shows how the text is now overwriting the green corruption. Sorry about the blurriness, but if you look carefully you may notice that the file with the incorrect block count is pcscd.pub, or something. This appears to be the file /var/run/pcscd.run, but I don’t really know what this does.

The latest post, however, piqued my interest. Because it doesn’t just apply to iPhone, or any handheld device, but any computing device in general:

How are they even going to know which apps do continue to run in the background? They won’t. A likely reaction would simply be to regret ever having junked up their iPhone with any third-party apps at all.

[From Daring Fireball: Foot, Meet Bullet]

I have a Nokia E65, and one of the “great” features is true multi-tasking. I say “great”, because this feature burned me not too long ago.

I use Salling Clicker - mainly as an automated syncing system, but also for interaction between the phone and Mac in other ways - from a Growl message when I receive a phone call, and my iTunes pausing, to sending SMS via bluetooth. Typing is much faster on a normal keyboard! (Granted, this is using emitSMS, not Salling Clicker, but, meh).

Recently, I installed a bit of software that allowed me to download call and SMS lists, so I could access them and interpret my data usage patterns. It installed a background helper agent, which I didn’t even realise. Some time later I noticed I wasn’t receiving as many phone calls as before. It wasn’t a big difference since I mainly use the phone for calling, rather than receiving calls, but nonetheless it was a difference. When out at dinner with family, it came to a head. It turned out that every time someone tried to call me, the call was rejected, but not to voicemail. A second call immediately worked.

When a call came in, the phone displayed a (very short) out of memory error, and then this immediately disappeared. The light came on, which made me realise just how often it had occurred. I had seen the phone light turn on sometimes while my phone was next to me, but because the message was so short-lived, it had vanished by the time I looked at the screen. I’m talking less than a second here.

It turned out the faceless background app was using up all of the phone’s memory. Receiving a call initially failed, but if another call came immediately after, then it would work. I guess some memory was being freed, but being used again a short time later.

Long story short - I didn’t use the software I had installed, so junking it (and removing the installed helper, which wasn’t real easy) fixed the problem. But because the problem was intermittent, it was pretty hard to nail down.

I don’t even remember what the software was called. But I’m much more cautious about what I install onto my phone now.

I’ve had lots of hassles with this phone, and thought this might be just another one. But I’ve restarted both the phone and the Mac, and no joy.

If you look at the back of the emitSMS widget, you’ll be able to choose the serial port to connect to. If you try changing the port to one of the standard ones, it should give an almost immediate error. If you change it back to your phone’s serial port, and it hangs forever, there is a solution.

As can be seen from the image above, I’ve just created a second Dial-UpNetworking bluetooth port, and used that instead.

Open up System Preferences, and visit the Bluetooth panel. Select your phone, and select Edit Serial Ports… from the utility menu.

Add a new serial port using the plus button, and duplicate all of the settings.

Click Apply, and then change the serial port back in emitSMS. It should connect and identify your phone.

The machine was ordered online via the Apple Store. I’ve had issues with NextByte in the past, so I was a bit loathe to purchase through them. I rang them anyway, figuring that if they had one in store, I could order it, and collect it the same day.

They didn’t and said that they had about 6 on order, and there weren’t any in Australia.

Now, I knew that wasn’t the case, as Apple have a 24 hour shipping note on this model. So, it was “no thanks” to their offer to place an order. And I ordered online.

Within about 5 hours, my order had shipped. And, for evidence that it has been shipped, TNT have the following data about my package:

So, I’m all excited. My new machine is supposed to arrive tomorrow…

Ah, I’ve been there. Mine was dual-booting OS X onto an unsupported Dell PC. I had a second Hard Disk that I was putting it onto, yet somehow I managed to screw up the Windows partition as well. Luckily I didn’t destroy the laptop. And I never got near the sharks…

And, yet another plug for xkcd.com - if you haven’t subscribed to his RSS feed, then you really should.

A USB TV Tuner stick.

I went for the miglia TVmini2, as it was (I thought) fairly inexpensive. I’m not sure I made the right decision right now.

For starters, it doesn’t actually come with the software. Sure, it’s got a CD with some demo software of other stuff, but the actual software (which is actually written by another company, called equinox), The Tube, needs to be downloaded from the internet before installation.

Which wouldn’t be too bad, but it’s a 104Mb download. Which meant I couldn’t (a) start playing with it as soon as I bought it, since I was in town, and not near a free wireless point, and (b) start playing with it as soon as I got home, since it took about 30 minutes to grab.

It gets worse, though. Even though the software really requires a dongle (the USB tuner is really just a dongle, after all), the manufacturers insist that you register the software, using the included key string. And it only works on one machine without de-registration, apparently. Which kind of sucks, because I’d like to have it moved between more than one machine.

The hardware itself seems okay. I haven’t been able to make it work with any other software yet. I’ve tried a couple of downloads, but they wouldn’t recognise it.

System Profiler reports the device as looking like:

TVMini2:

Version: 1.00

Bus Power (mA): 500

Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec

Manufacturer: Miglia

Product ID: 0×0069

Serial Number: 0000000001

Vendor ID: 0×18f3

The software, on the other hand, seems to have some good features, but quite a few flaws.

The manufacturers have decided to make the application scriptable. This is a very good thing, as it will allow me to, for instance, set up Salling Clicker to be able to control it. Which will be very good. I’d also be able to make a rudimentary controller for network or local remote control. Which I may do: more on that later.

Another good feature is the simplicity of the software. The basic window is shown below.

You basically have a video section, with a controller on the right. This appears to be fixed. Although you can hide the main video area, they resize together. Which is a bad thing, if you like to resize the video to a small size while you write a review of something, for instance. Like I’d like to do now. It means that the controller becomes fairly unusable fairly quickly:

This is as small as the remote area gets. Any further resizing just shrinks the video display in that window. You can hide the Details area (this is shown above), but you can’t hide the record area.

You can hide the remote, too. This makes shrinking the video a bit more usable:

I anticipate being able to build another controller that floats, and can be used in conjunction with the view shown above. More below on some issues that might appear with this, when I discuss the AppleScript interface in a bit of detail.

The controller itself is mostly okay. The main/default view has a list of channels. This is customisable. You can scan for channels, and then delete the ones you don’t watch, and rename the ones you do. Scanning takes a long time, and is probably worth re-doing every now and then, just in case a new station has been added.

The bottom area of the controller is the recording pane. You can pause live TV, record the current stream, and if you have been watching a channel for a little while, skip back through the already viewed stuff. I did a quick test where I watched for a while, then went back to try to record a section from the past. The program developed a spinning beach ball, and I had to Force Quit. I’ll continue to test it again later, as this is a nice feature.

There’s also a button link to their other software, MediaCentral, which totes itself as a total replacement for FrontRow. And, I’ve had a bit of a look at it. It looks pretty good, actually. May be worth investing in, and using this on the Mac Mini when I finally get it, and set it up as my Media Centre. (Typing Central reminds me to just let all of the yanks out there know the correct way to spell centre. Yank is a slang term Australians use to refer to Americans).

If you record live TV, it stores it in the recordings pane.

You can then export from here, in order to be able to view on another device, or in another program. It exports raw DV fairly quickly (almost real time, I think, perhaps even faster), but as expected exporting to m4v takes a bit longer. It appears that these are the only formats it will export: iPod, iPhone and AppleTV are all m4v, and iMovie is DV. I’m still going to record some stuff and see what the quality is like. Gotta wait for some decent content first.

Which brings me nicely to the next topic. Electronic Program Guide and Scheduled Recording. The interface is, again, fairly simple. All programs appear in the one list, there doesn’t appear to be a method of filtering so sort by channels. You can search or filter by title and description. To schedule a recording, simply click the black dot next to the program time.

Clicking on a title will show the details about that program. This is obtained from the digital TV data stream, although it is possible to add in an external TV guide, using the open XMLTV standard. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to subscribe to an XML feed. EPG via RSS, that would be awesome.

If you click on the “Show Recordings” button, it will filter to only display the programs you have scheduled to record. You can then de-select them by re-clicking the red dot. Fairly easy to understand. It also seems to have some smarts about overlapping programs, and will display a different coloured dot when they clash.

Okay, feature list is pretty much done. What doesn’t it do, or what does it do badly?

AppleScript support.

You can do quite a few things with AppleScript, such as pause, play, start recording and so on. It appears that you cannot get decent data from the EPG, for instance. So I can’t build a fully replacement EPG in another application, unless I access the data directly from the file. This file is stored as an SQLite database. So I should be able to grep data out of this using the relevant tools. This seems to be an oversight, since you can schedule recordings, and access the EPG data, but I can’t figure out how to get meaningful data from the EPG. This would be a necessity for a proper Salling Clicker interface, that allowed me to just run the program in full-screen mode and only use the phone for the remote, doing all of the programming with that instead.

You can also export from AppleScript. Not sure if you can choose to export DV, which I would probably want to do. So I can post-process the data and remove advertisements, for instance. But I cannot find a way to choose a channel by channel name. Which would be useful for a remote program, either on phone or computer.

Possibly the biggest annoyance: in every instance I have seen, this application is called The Tube. But to access it in AppleScript, you need to use TheTube. Why do this? You can have spaces in application names in AppleScript and it works fine.

Data file formats.

The channel data is stored as an XML/plist file. Which is a good thing. You can hand-tweak this file, which is much faster than, and less error-prone than deleting them inside the software. Especially since right-clicking to delete doesn’t actually select the channel, so the previously selected channel gets deleted instead.

Scheduled programs are also plist files. You could create these files with another piece of software, and just rely on The Tube to record them. I haven’t tried creating a file and seeing if it automatically records, or whether you need to start/re-start The Tube to get it to notice. Still on the TODO list.

The video data is stored in a package. There are a couple of TIFFs, for preview purposes, but these aren’t always the correct aspect ration. In fact, since most of my Digital TV seems to be broadcast in 16:9, with black bars on the sides, this is always the wrong aspect ratio as these TIFFs are all 4:3.

Bonus points if you can name the song and artist this preview is from!

Inside the package is a plist file with data about the recording. But the actual data is stored in two files, Media.tvi and Media.tvm. I’m still trying to find out what file format these are - VLC doesn’t seem to recognise them, although I suspect they are a standard file format, just hidden. I’d like to be able to get this data without necessarily having to use The Tube. According to one website, this data is just the raw MPEG stream. Changing the file extension to .mpg or .mpeg doesn’t allow for playback Might need more research.

Firstly, and foremostly, there is a noticeable delay when doing particular actions. For instance, pressing the Address Book key and then typing a name in means you invariably miss the first couple of letters. And it only sorts by the start of the name, not text within the name.

Secondly, and at times more annoyingly, if I happen to close the slide at the same time as another action happens, like someone hanging up on the other end of the phone, it turns off.

That’s right, the phone goes dead. I then need to wait (minutes, it feels like) for the phone to finish starting up again.

The camera is badly placed, too. Not that I want to do video calls, but I can’t see the caller and them see me at the same time. because there is only one camera, and it is on the back.

Another annoyance is that address book entries don’t have a default number by default. And it takes ages to go through (delays each time) to setup the defaults. And these don’t sync properly with Apple’s Address Book, so if you reset your phone (for instance, to see if you can fix the shutdown bug), you lose all of the defaults you have carefully set up.

There is no autolock. It prompts you to lock when you close the slide. You can install software to automatically lock after a period of time, but if you close the slide at the same time as when the autolock kicks in, the phone turns off.

Bluetooth appears a bit dodgy at times. Sometimes it no longer connects to my computer, and I need to restart my phone. I think it is more to do with the phone than the computer, but I’m not sure.

Battery life is crap. I didn’t want to have to charge my phone every night, but if I use WiFi, then I do. If I just use Bluetooth, which I need to have for synching, then it’s every second day.

Salling Clicker is awesome. I have an addon script that synchs my phone every day, and it displays incoming and outgoing caller information via Growl. It also fades my system volume, and pauses iTunes when I am on the phone. This is the sort of thing that computers should do. All of the time.