Baud Attitude

So, I took our Denon 2910 DVD player in for service last Sunday because it had stopped playing some - but not all - CDs, and I honestly expected to get it back with a note of “could not reproduce problem.”

This worry was intensified somewhat when the retailer called back five days later saying that I could come and pick up my player.  I mean, it was cool that they’d shipped it off to Denon and gotten it back already, don’t get me wrong, but it seemed like that wasn’t really enough time to test it and fix it.

I took along a power cord and a couple of CDs that had exhibited problems.  I’m not an idiot.

Happily, when I plugged the player in at the store and put CDs into it, it recognized them without difficulty, so I took it home to confront my next worry.

See, the whole reason we went with this model of Denon was that it could be made region-free by pushing a few buttons, no modification needed.

When I took it in, I was really hoping that, in addition to actually being able to see the problem, that they wouldn’t exercise their right to say “well, it’s broken, here’s this year’s model DVD player instead.”

They didn’t do that, which was nice.  They found that the problem was that the optical drive was, well, worn out, replaced the drive, which sorted out the problem neatly, and I should have been worry-free from that point on, only:

The work order also said “UPGRADED FIRMWARE”, and this made me somewhat nervous, because that’s the sort of things companies do to get rid of little things like back-door-region-code-mods.

We got it home, I plugged it in, and all the settings were back to the default states, as if it were new from box.  This was a pretty good indication that they had done the firmware upgrade they mentioned.

I put in a region 1 disc, which played just fine.

Then I put in our region 2 Nausicaa DVD, and THAT played just fine.

So life is good.  I’m not sure how they upgraded the firmware without knocking it back to a region 1 player, but I’m not going to bitch.

There’s a Hole in Our Entertainment Center (Where Our DVD Player Used to Be) isn’t nearly as good of a country song title as the Xbox one, but I’m singing it today anyway.

See, a couple of years ago, we decided to replace the DVD/LD combo player that was starting to show its age with a modern DVD player.  I was also of the mind that, if we were going to do that, we should get something really solid and built to last, but also easily made region-free.

So we wound up with a Denon 2910, which was, well, about six times the cost of just walking into Fred Meyers and grabbing a cheap Sony unit off the shelf, but probably worth at least some of the premium, and because I we were dropping far too much money on a DVD player, we also dropped the 45 bucks on the 4 year extended warranty.

That decision turned out to be prescient this weekend - it’s not like the thing exploded into a ball of flame or anything, and it’s not like there were any problems with DVD playback, but it stopped playing CDs.

That’s a little simplified.  More accurately:

Occasionally, you’d put in a CD and the player would make a sad little whining noise and act like it didn’t have a disc inserted.  It was consistantly bad for some discs, whereas other discs played just fine, and it wasn’t a burned-vs-original issue because all the discs we were trying were original CDs.

My wife noticed the problem when she put in a TM Revolution CD and it failed, and then she tried several different TMR CDs and they all failed.

I put in a disc of Caramelldansen remixes, and that worked just fine, followed by a MOSAIC.WAV album that also worked.

It couldn’t play the Video Girl Ai soundtrack, though, so it’s not like it was just TMR albums for some weird reason.

Then I put in Def Leppard - Hysteria, and it couldn’t play THAT, and at that point it got disconnected from the entertainment center and hauled off to the retailer we bought it, and its service plan from, because frankly any player that can’t play Hysteria is not a working player.

So, they say they’ll have it fixed in two or three weeks, and in the meantime we have to make do with the three other things hooked up to the TV that can play DVDs.

That brings the “stuff that needed fixing this year” count to three - my camera, the Xbox360, now this.

It’s been a rough year for electronic gadgets around here.

Windows Update can officially go to hell.

When I turned on the EEE for the first time, it had about 2.5GB free on a 4GB disk.  After letting Windows update run free, I’ve got a whopping .5 GB free.

When I get back to the states and have access to an external DVD drive, I’m going to have to run the recovery disk and zero this thing back to a known state, then be a little pickier about what updates I allow.

I’m really quite glad for the 4GB SDHC card that came free in the box, if I didn’t have that, this PC would be pretty close to unusable now.

Backstory: A little over a week ago - Feb 26 to be precise - I realized that my camera, my beautiful pink camera, was broken.  A little bit.  Well, the “up” button on the keypad wasn’t working, and this is also the button that controls flash settings so it’s pretty crippling for only being one broken button.

I was quite vexed.  It’s not like I went out and dropped seven hundred bucks on a big ol’ digital SLR or anything, but it was still close to $200 for the camera and it certainly wasn’t anything I was going to be able to fix myself.  I figured I was stuck buying a new camera, and that I probably wouldn’t be able to get it in pink.

Then I had one of those rare moments of inspiration and decided to look up just how long I’d had this thing, which proved to be the first time that I’ve gotten any practical benefit from keeping this site updated.  I’d mentioned buying it in an earlier post. On March 11 of last year.  Which meant that - after I did a little frantic googling to find out how long the warranty was - I had a little under two weeks to get it serviced under warranty.

The next day, I called the 800 number on the warranty and spoke with a very pleasant-sounding customer service rep, who walked me through resetting the camera and verifying that, yes, it was broken, which I suppose they have to do, and then issued me a work order number and gave me an address to ship it off to.

I shipped it off via priority mail on February 28th, got an email a couple of days later telling me that they’d received it, another email Monday night with a tracking number, and a UPS delivery today.  And, yes, the button works again.

Total cost: Something like $5.00 to ship.

It is just conceivable that I’m a little too impressed by this.  I’m sure that other people have things break and get fixed under warranty ALL THE TIME.  This is just the first time I’ve actually had something stop working while it was still covered, so the general smoothness of the process was unexpected and a welcome surprise.

So: Sony Repair Service, two thumbs up.

There’s a reason the latest PC in my apartment is named Vanity: I really didn’t need another PC. I certainly didn’t need a small form factor PC.

But… I kept seeing references around the net to the Intel BLKD201GLYL motherboard, which is a mini-ITX form factor motherboard with a 1.33Ghz Celeron M processor and integrated graphics, sound, LAN, USB, everything you really need for a basic PC.

It was also $69.99 from Newegg, which is much cheaper than other small form factor motherboards I’ve seen in the past. Mind you, you don’t get a fancy box or manuals for your 70 bucks:

But who needs that stuff anyway?

And here’s the thing: I have an old Athlon box I use for, well, leaving on for days at a time while it downloads huge files.

And when I’ve done a lot of that in any given month, I notice it on the electric bill. Athlons, while great processors for the time, are not exactly shy on the power usage.

Building a box around the D201GLY, with a 2.5″ HD, means that I have a PC that pulls less than 40W of power.

It’s also a lot quieter and doesn’t push out nearly as much heat as the Athlon.

So that’s my justification.

Getting everything together was trickier than I’d anticipated, and not just because I had to take the case completely apart to get the motherboard in. I’d expected to have to fuss about with getting components to fit, and I’d actually expected to wind up having to go out shopping for some essential adapter or another that hadn’t been included with the motherboard or case. It turned out that the iStar case came with a whole mess of cables, so the physical assembly actually went off all right.

The biggest problem was that, to save power - and also to save the cost of a slim-line DVD drive - I didn’t build in an optical drive.

I was booting from an external USB DVD-ROM drive and that didn’t work very well with the first drive I used, which was an I/O Magic external DVD-RW drive - I couldn’t get a Windows XP CD to boot at all.

I could get a Windows 98 CD to boot, but this motherboard doesn’t play nice with Windows 98.

I had the best results booting from a bare IDE drive hooked up with a Newertechnology Universal Drive Adapter, which is an essential piece of kit and one I strongly recommend to any geek who finds themselves having lots of bare drives lying about.

Once I switched to that, XP booted up promptly and the rest was a matter of partition, format, install, blah blah blah.

Installing Windows XP from a pre-SP1 CD is fun, by the way. Windows Update doesn’t work when you’re starting from that far back, so I had to find a way to manually download SP2 from Microsoft’s web site, and after that was installed I wound up with 90 (!) updates to install from Windows Update.

Here’s Vanity, assembled, OS installed, and ready to be put to work:

Cute, no?

…now that I have a blu-ray disc player, I’ve been paying more attention to assorted forum threads talking about the format.

There’s lots of folks out there who are convinced that both HD formats are doomed and that, instead of any disc format succeeding in the marketplace, we’re going to all be switching to digital downloads in the next few years… and this may be true.  I’m no oracle.

But, what gets to me is that people keep comparing blu-ray to laserdisc, with the implication that laserdisc was a failure and that blu-ray will be following in its footsteps.

This bewilders me.

Laserdisc had, well, more than a few shortcomings.  The discs were prone to self-destructing, the players were expensive, the discs were difficult to master and costly to produce, and you had to flip the disc over or put a new disc in every hour.

Even so, and even with less than 5% market penetration, and in a time when most people thought that VHS on their 19″ TVs looked JUST FINE and that letterboxing was taking away picture, it still managed to last for 20 years and get 10,000+ titles released - from high-profile blockbuster movies to the most obscure foreign and indie titles you could think of.

I’m HOPING that blu-ray “fails” even half as well as laserdisc “failed”.

Last year my wife got me a really keen swissbit MP3-player/Swiss Army Knife gadget for my birthday.

It made a pretty darn good MP3 player for walking, since I didn’t have to worry about destroying a hard disk, and it made a pretty decent, uh, well, knife, nail file, and scissors. It doesn’t really have a lot of knifey bits, but it’s a swiss army knife that plays MP3s and that’s really good enough for me.

Swissbit, knowing that they produced a product that didn’t have to try very much harder to be cool, really didn’t try very hard after they came up with the “It’s a knife that plays music” concept, so I did have a couple of gripes - nothing serious, just the sorts of things that fall short of perfection.

It doesn’t have any kanji support, and I couldn’t use it as a drive under Windows (it was my first introduction to the concept of “MTP” devices, which was pretty educational) and if you plugged it in to a PC and launched Windows Media Player before it had a chance to charge for a bit, Windows Media Player would crash very very hard. It was the crashing Media Player thing that really vexed me.

Still, these are pretty minor gripes and I learned to work around them. Mostly just a matter of making sure to plug the player in at least 30 minutes before I wanted to sync anything to it.

Yesterday I decided to see if they’d done anything about these, and I found that there was a new firmware version that let you use it as a removable disk AND seems to have fixed the crashing media player thing. It also added OGG support and a bunch of general usability stuff.

It installed with no problems, and the player is greatly improved by it.

Still no kanji support, but I can deal with that.

Flush with the heady glow of success, I decided to see what else I could find new firmware for…

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