Category: computers suck

iRiver H120

h120.jpg

I’ve had the iRiver H120 for a few weeks now, and I think I’ve used enough of the functions to give it a fair appraisal. I bought it because it would make a good portable hard disk, which coincidentally would play MP3s on my long commute.

The device is basically a Toshiba 20GB mini hard drive with a direct USB2.0 connection to its FAT32 filesystem. It also supports USB1.1, which means that the H120 will interface (albeit slowly) to most machines you’d meet today.

This is how my Linux boxes identify the H120 on power up:

scsi3 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
  Vendor: TOSHIBA   Model: MK2004GAL         Rev: JC10
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi3, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sdb: 39063024 512-byte hdwr sectors (20000 MB)
 /dev/scsi/host3/bus0/target0/lun0: p1

It’s easy enough to figure out a mount point from this information.

I don’t think I have USB2.0 support quite figured out on my machine, as I find transfers to and from the H120 to be rather slow. Sometimes I find that large transfers time out, causing the device to remount read-only. A pain, but it does ensure that the filesystem doesn’t corrupt itself.

I couldn’t be happier with the sound quality. With all my MP3s encoded with LAME‘s standard preset, and using Sennheiser headphones, it sounds great. The H120 will play other file formats (Ogg, WMA and WAV), but I’m primarily interested in MP3s. Never quite got the Ogg thing, despite its open source credentials.

A lot of people complain about the H120’s lack of gapless playback between MP3s. Sometimes this bugs me a little, other times I don’t notice it. iRiver claim to be working on it, and it’s easy to upgrade the firmware when they do.

There are also options to use M3U playlists (which are absurdly easy to generate using the find, tr and sed commands — I must show you someday), and also an ‘iRiverDB’ database. I found the latter worse than useless; it increased startup time by over a minute, and seemed to get its genre recognition spectacularly wrong. At least it’s optional on the H120. I usually just play directories of files arranged by artist and album.

The H120 has a useful set of IO ports. In addition to its headphone and (proprietary) remote socket, there’s digital in and out, plus analogue line in and out, and external microphone input too. There’s also a built-in mike for voice recording. The digital in, when coupled to a CD player with digital out, allows you to rip even the most broken copy-controlled CD.

Last night I recorded The Decemberists at Lee’s Palace with the H120, and it came out quite well. I have a Sony ECM909A stereo microphone, which works better than it should for live taping. I recorded to 44.1kHz 16-bit stereo WAV (it can also do a variety of MP3 bitrates), and it’s nice to see the results sitting as files directly in the filesystem. There’s an (arbitrary?) limit of 74 minutes on WAV recordings, after which the H120 will go into record pause mode, and will start recording again on pressing a key.

My biggest complaint about recording with the iRiver is that there is no level meter, and no way of changing record level in mid-recording. I had to be very conservative with my record levels to make sure that last night’s recording didn’t clip, so I have a good — but quiet, though fixable with normalize — recording of the show. I took the iRiver community website‘s advice and recorded without the remote attached, and consequently got a noise-free record.

I also find the iRiver’s controls to be a little confusing, especially when you get to recording. I was forever accidentally knocking it into FM radio mode before the show started. For day to day playing, however, it works perfectly.

I’ve also found the remote to be a bit flimsy. Before I knew how careful I needed to be with it, one self-destructed in a subway turnstile. The main unit itself seems to be quite solid.

I’m very happy with my H120. It holds a decent part of my CD collection, it’s a handy portable hard drive, and it records with at least the same quality as my MD recorder. It may not have the caché of the iPod, but it also doesn’t have the “please mug me” white cables of the Apple box.

Addendum, June 14: The USB timing out problem has gone away now that I have compiled in USB2.0 support into my kernel; and transfers are extremely fast. This problem doesn’t seem to happen with my USB1.1 Thinkpad which, while slow, works perfectly with the H120.

cheesepiphany

The age I am, I thought I was a one cheese sort of a guy. Give me a good mature cheddar — none of your vac-packed rubbish, but something with a bit of history to it, like from Alex Farm Products — and I was in cheese heaven.

Or so I thought. I occasionally like a piece of blue cheese on a steak, so I asked them at Alex's on the Danforth what they’d recommend. They came up with Fourme D’ambert. As Alex say, Its flavour is assertive piquant with a mellow buttery finish.. I’m already looking forward to it on oatcakes for lunch.

In a different kind of cheesey news, my Sympatico DSL modem is on its last legs. They’re sending me a new one, but this one’s currently pegged at some ridiculously low speed so I can even connect at all. The tech at the (third stage) support centre says they’re really pushing for VoIP, with expected rollout in two years. That would be nice.

ebay.ca “page not responding” with mozilla

ebay.ca seems to have great difficulty generating pages for Mozilla. I can have ebay.ca open on both Mozilla and Internet Explorer, and feed them the same URL. Internet Explorer loads it fine; Mozilla comes up with Page Not Responding.

This appears to be entirely repeatable, certainly on my Windows box. Try it for yourself; here’s a sample URL for camera tripods.

How to make Windows suck 10000 fewer times

In the same spirit of Marvin’s comment about Arthur Dent’s brain (It amazes me how you manage to live in anything that small.), it amazes me that anyone can actually get work done on a Windows box without having virtual workspaces …

But I found DESKWIN, which does all I need; four virtual desktops, with hotkeys between them. Not much else. Perfect. Well, okay, Windows has still got about seven orders of magnitude of improvement to go before it’s even mildly usable, but it’s a start.

too many cables

The iRiver remote unit decided to self destruct last night, so it was a rather hurried trip off to G-WIZ to get it replaced. I’m also having a bit of a problem with cable management — my Sennheiser headphones have a 3.5m cable, and there’s probably another good metre or so of cable on the iRiver remote. So I’m wandering around looking as if I’m lugging a protable recording studio, even though the player itself is quite svelte.

raw, raw!

I’ve just ‘hacked’ my Nikon Coolpix 2500 to run in raw mode, using cpixraw (on a Windows machine, alas). I can read the files with Dave Coffin’s dcraw. So far, it seems I’m getting a bit more extra detail than from the original JPEG files.

The only real disadvantage I can see is that for every picture I take, a regular JPEG and a raw file is created. The raw file is confusingly called *.jpg. I think I can live with this.

iRiver, youRiver, hesheitRivers

I just bought an iRiver H120 portable hard disk/audio player/recorder. It seems to work quite well with Linux, so far. Even at over 9MB/s, it’s taking a while to transfer my music collection.

I bought it from the terribly-named G-Wiz store in Scarborough Town Centre. I think it might’ve been a store return — there was some truly execrable music on it (Eminem and Kylie Minogue … bleah!), and the packaging was slightly open. Hmm.

illicit substance: Caffeinated Scots Tablet

I make Scots Tablet; in fact, I’m almost famous for it. I also roast my own coffee, which I get from Merchants of Green Coffee. What harm could come from combining the two, I thought?

Plenty, is the answer. By adding ¼ cup (measured before grinding) of finely-ground coffee beans to a half batch of tablet has resulted in almost black tarry lumps that combined sugar, butterfat and caffeine into a mallet-to-the-back-of-the-head rush.

Next time, I might use just a smidge less coffee. At the moment, it’s like a cross between full-on Rademaker’s Haagsche Hopjes and Uncle Ump’s Umpty Candy. I suspect that the RCMP will come knocking soon.

Fortran has no STDERR

I suspect it’s comp.lang.fortran‘s second most frequently-asked question, but the language has no concept of stderr, the POSIX error output stream. Or at least, there’s no standard IO unit attached to stderr, if it’s defined at all.

Since writing to stderr is my usual debug message method, this is going to be a slog …

so it might not look much to you …

mapedit10x10.png
Being able to see this represents quite a bit of work on my part. It’s the output from WAsP‘s map editor, reprsenting some terrain roughness data exported from Surfer.

The original data set looks a bit like this:

gridvalues.png

It’s a grid of values. Unfortunately, WAsP wants the boundaries, and it took me a while to work out a (rather inefficient) algorithm to find them.

Now I have to go off and recode this in Fortran 90. I’m glad that the Intel® Fortran Compiler for Linux is available free.

HSBC must really hate Linux

HSBC Canada Bank discriminates against Linux users. On April 18th, they “upgraded” their online banking facilities. Before this, they were slightly clunky, but worked just fine on almost any browser and computer I’d care to try.

Since Sunday, though, this is what I get when I try to access my bank details using Mozilla 1.6 on any of my Linux boxes:

To access internet banking, please use:
* Internet Explorer version 5.0 or above; or
o Netscape Communicator version 4.72 or above (version 6.x currently not supported)

So I mail them about this, and get this reply:

We apologize for the inconvenience; however effective April 18, 2004, when we launched our Personal Internet Banking update, the browsers that our Internet Banking will support are as follows: Internet Explorer 5.5 and up, Netscape 6.2.1 or 7.1.

I dutifully install Netscape 7.1 on my notebook, and what do I get?

To access internet banking, please use:
* Internet Explorer version 5.0 or above; or
o Netscape Communicator version 4.72 or above (version 6.x currently not supported)

And this is with the real bloated-as-life Netscape 7.1
[Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 ] browser.

Things got really weird when I tried Mozilla 1.6
[Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113] under Windows 2000 — and it worked just fine.

My usual browser identifies itself as [Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040406]. Looking at HSBC’s browser-sniffing code (eww!) I find that it’s looking for Windows or Mac more than it cares about the actual browser.

I’d best go tell Evan, who maintains the very useful Banks ‘n’ Browsers page, that HSBC must really hate Linux. They really don’t need to give me yet another reason to switch banks.

wireless dilemma

Okay, so I’ve got two wireless cardbus cards — an SMC 2435W and a D-Link DWL-650+. Both use the same chipset. Which to keep?

Yes, this evening saw Stewart wandering about his street in Scarborough seeing where each card gave out. I got some strange looks.

I think the D-Link card has the edge in range, being able to connect from across the street. It was a bit more expensive, and it has a bulkier aerial. The SMC is more svelte, and was less than half the price. I’d probably recommend both cards, if you can handle the hassle of building the acx100 driver.

I should really test their battery drain. I have a felling that the D-Link’s a bit of a hog, as my battery is dropping quite fast.

okay, so maybe it wasn’t so bad

So ufile.ca did actually work for us, but only under Mozilla on Catherine’s eMac. The process was actually quite painless, and their user interface is nice — if if works with your browser.

It’s strange that they claim that their system works with Linux, yet got into such a terrible mess with me.

Anyway, that’s our taxes filed. I’ll try not to spend all of my refund in the one shop.

happy computer = happy stewart

After only weeks of messing about with this ThinkPad, I’ve finally got the D-Link DWL-650+ wireless card working. So I’m enjoying the luxury of composing this entry unplugged, emerging some Gentoo packages, and listening to MC Honky. The joys of new computing facility are always short lived; it’s like the first and only time you go “Wow!” at how fast your new computer is. After that, it’s just how fast a computer should be.

(Talking of “wow”, the speakers on this T21 are just the perfect sound and separation to listen to lofi. The playlist has just skipped to Neutral Milk Hotel, and Jeff Mangum has just hollered I Love You, Jesus Christ like to raise my nape hairs.)

Anyway, I got the DWL-650+ working by following the instructions all the way through. Radical, no?

I also had to do some rescue work on the T21, as I’d accidentally found a way to bork /sbin/init (to none Unix types: about the same as deleting some choice DLLs in the System directory) by giving Gentoo a USE flag suggested by emerge -p -v baselayout. How was I supposed to know that the relatively innocuous build option is a special low level guaranteed-not-to-actually-build-this-don’t-even-think-of-using-this option.

With Holland, 1945 wailing out of the tiny tinny speakers, I can retire to bed happy.