Archive for the "Technology" Category

BT Vision and On Demand Content

January 27th, 2008

For those who don’t know, BT Vision is an digital television service provided by BT with no annual charges. As part of the service you get a “V-box”, which is essentially a computer running a version of Windows CE with a couple of DVB-T tuners in there to allow it to function as a PVR. It also connects to the internet and, through Microsoft’s service that they’re also going to implement on the Xbox 360, allows you to access a whole raft of on demand content.

Now, I’ve had this for a while – having decided to get it when I moved in due to it being cheap – and until last night I’d only really used it as a PVR. In this it works remarkably well, with a couple of niggles – mainly that sometimes the schedule isn’t up to date (as it gets that over the network rather than airwaves) and therefore it doesn’t adapt well to programs running a little late. I’ve also discovered that occasionally the clock gets a bit out of sync, and therefore I get the last few minutes of a show cut off. Other than these things it’s great and you can record up to two channels at once whilst watching something else that you’d already recorded (you can’t watch a third channel due to there only being a pair of DVB-T tuners).

Last night, however, I decided to investigate the on demand service. This provides a whole range of content from films (both provided by BT Vision and Film4 On Demand), to TV (BBC and Channel 4 providing a lot of content here), music and specialist know-how things (I discovered an entire section on pickles…) with prices varying from £0.79 for some TV up to £2.99 for a newly “released” film, with optional monthly subscriptions allowing you to watch an unlimited number of items from certain sections (depending upon the pack), although there isn’t one for Films. Once rented, you can watch the content an unlimited amount of times within the 24 hour period after playback starts, which is instantaneous due to it being streamed over your internet connection, and despite my connection not always being the best, it worked perfectly when I tried it out last night.

Of course, Microsoft also recently rolled out films to the Xbox 360 marketplace video store recently (in the UK at least, it’s been in the US for a while I believe). This also provides some on demand functionality, including HD versions of some films. This operates on much the same principle, only you download the film to the Xbox’s hard drive, and can start watching it any time within a 14 day period, with the same 24 hour limit after playback commences. The downloading to the hard drive, however, means that you can’t just select a film and go – and the selection is no where near as wide as that on BT Vision.

All in all, however, I think that on demand content like this is a great idea and certainly going to be used more in the future. Sure it might be more limited than going out and buying a DVD; but for one off situations where you just feel like watching something it’s great.

 

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KDE4 on Kubuntu

January 13th, 2008

So, the other day KDE4 was released, with a new interface and widgets and whatnot. It all looked pretty shiny, and I finally got around to installing the kubuntu packages for it this morning.

It all looked rather promising when logging in for the first time, it started up my media player of choice (amarok) and that started where it’d left off with my previous KDE3 login, although this might have been to do with me having run a pre-release version of KDE4 before. Unfortunately there wasn’t much else to endear it to me at the moment.

Firstly there’s now no longer any sort of run dialog, be it the search bar in the new application launcher thing acting as one if it can’t find anything on the menu (ala Vista) or an option on the “classic” look one. It just doesn’t exist, for me to run a command that isn’t on the menu I need to navigate the menu to find a terminal, load that, run the command, and then close the terminal. Hardly great – especially when there are apps that I need missing from the menu (kontact is an example) – I’m guessing due to lack of KDE4 packages at the moment.

Then there’s the new panel, plasma has added all these new widgets and stuff, which is great, but it seems that they forgot to include some of the settings that existed in the old ones. The task manager, for example, seems to only be able to show windows from all desktops, which I don’t want. This makes it rather hard to use once you get over a few windows open, especially given that the panel is now around double the size that I had it at in KDE3.

I was also frustrated by the keyboard shortcuts, of course I could change these – but there seemed to be no preference settings in the system settings dialog that I was forced to use due to the lack of kcontrol for KDE4 in kubuntu. This system settings thing, however, should just display the relevant “pages” of kcontrol, so I’m going to guess that the option might be missing. It also seemed to fail miserably at handling my attempts to use my “Windows” key on my keyboard for stuff, and even when I made no changes crashed when I closed it… hardly a good thing.

All in all I gave up trying to use KDE4 in about 30 minutes. Hardly great.

Please feel free to comment on how I was doing things horribly wrong, but to me it seems that KDE4 isn’t really finished yet… at least not on kubuntu.

 

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Minor Adventures in Networking

December 28th, 2007

Having visited the family over Christmas I brought my laptop back down to my flat with me in case I found a use for it. The first use was on the train where I took advantage of National Express’ free wireless on the trains. It wasn’t too bad, aside from a couple of internet drops and a bit of lag; but on a train I was hardly expecting wonders and it certainly helped alleviate boredom.

Once back in my flat I figured it’d be sensible to connect it up to my wireless network provided by my BT HomeHub. This all went simply enough, but the connection (despite seemingly being strong) was never reliable; even when sat next to the wireless access point. This is something I had previously experienced with my Nintendo DS, and I’m putting it down to the mass of interference that is no doubt being given off by my TV/PC (with bluetooth adapter)/XBox/BT-Vision box.

Thinking about this a bit more I decided that chances are I’d never really want to use my laptop in the lounge anyway, and that therefore the only room that I would want to use it in would be the bedroom. I also remembered that I had a set of homeplug adapters that I got with my BT-Vision kit that I never found use for. Clearly this was a perfect opportunity to try them out.

They were remarkably easy to set up, plug them into power, plug the one in the lounge into the network and plug the laptop into the other. Done. Their box claims speeds of up to 200mbps, and while sceptical I’ve got nothing over 100mbps to test them with, and don’t really care as I’m only going to be using it for web anyway.

As a result I’ve also killed off my wireless, as I’m not likely to use it (and couldn’t with the signal dropping as much as it was), and now have a single wire going along the wall in my lounge until I get another 4-way to go with the rest of the stuff by the TV… still, beats having to run a wire all around my flat and does the job.

 

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KDE on Windows

December 26th, 2007

Following up from my blog on IM Applications, mulletron linked me to the KDE Windows Project installer, which was recently released in a pre-release state. I had a rummage around and also found the instructions.

I therefore decided to give this a look and have installed some of the things that I use on my KDE install at home. First up, naturally, was the kdenetwork package containing Kopete. The installer itself is quite simple, you tick the packages you want, and it goes off and grabs the right dependencies and whatnot. These packages are then downloaded into a folder of your choosing, installed (again into a folder of your choice) and away you go.

As the downloaded files included Qt, kdebase and kdelibs it took some time, but this was not unexpected (especially over the wireless connection on this machine).

In the previous post I did suggest that ideally I’d be after a portable solution. Unfortunately KDE doesn’t really fit this at the moment due both to being over 1GB in size, and also requiring environment variable settings (which obviously won’t be possible everywhere).

Once it was installed and I’d set up my environment variables I ran kopete.exe… and it crashed. So, reading the other information on the wiki, I ran kbuildsycoca4.exe by hand and then re-ran kopete.exe, and hey presto there was the Kopete GUI (along with a whole host of other apps that I tested such as kwrite and konqueror – although that had some issues browsing HTML it seems).

Unfortunately it seems that there was something wrong with the Jabber implementation, as I couldn’t add that account, and there seems to be something else that’s not quite there with Kopete as it seems not to want to connect to the MSN servers.

Obviousy with this being a pre-release version I wasn’t expecting great things. The fact that it runs at all is a great indication to me that there is a chance of this all being pulled together very soon. I’d also like to see the install being more automated, with setting environment variables and whatnot, but we’ll have to see.

 

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IM Applications

December 24th, 2007

Being at home for Christmas, I’m using my family’s Windows machine for my computing purposes and as such I don’t have access to my usual suite of applications. For instant messaging this is usually Kopete, which allows me to connect to a multitude of different IMP protocols (MSN and Jabber in my case) from in a single client.

On Windows I have access to the official MSN client, but this fails to meet my requirements of supporting multiple protocols. That and it looks atrocious, failing miserably to fit into the style of Windows XP (even with the tellytubby theme).

So, after some rummaging around for something else that supports the protocols I need and is free. Ideally I was also after something that could be made portable (via USB stick).

Trillian was the first port of call, having previously used it, but this was soon ruled out due to not supporting Jabber in the “Basic” version.

I then moved on to looking at portableapps.com for a USB stick friendly client. This provided me with two options; Miranda and Pidgin.

Miranda seemed to be very lightweight, especially in terms of graphics, but was immediately obtrusive with asking for details for specific accounts for protocols I’ve never used. Investigating the options menu I found a mass of options (even more than Kopete it seemed – and people often say KDE apps are overloaded in terms of options), but not one to have multiple connections to the same protocol. Investigation on this matter resulted in a suggestion to copy the plugin and do it that way; hardly ideal.

So I was left with Pidgin, which used to be called GAIM. Again I’d previously used this back when it was GAIM, so I knew what to expect. Of course GTK on Windows is hardly ideal, but it doesn’t look that bad, aside from the large font used in the contact list (or “buddy list” as Pidgin seems to want to call it). Alas this doesn’t seem to do it right either, with the groups on my contact list being arranged in a seemingly random order – with no way of changing that.

Maybe I’ve just been using Kopete for too long and have got used to it, but compared to the other applications I’ve tried over the past few days it’s got them beaten hands down.
All I can hope is that when KDE4 and Qt4 make their way into the wild, a Windows version of Kopete also follows.

 

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