One of the rare niggles I’ve had with the mostly fantastic HTC Hero has been it’s thirst for power. And by power I mean battery power, not influence over nations. A while back I read a tweet about Mugen Power’s new 3200mAh battery for the Hero. Back then I still had some money set aside for impulse purchases so I ordered one. It took almost three weeks to arrive and came with a new battery door, i.e. a replacement plastic rear cover for the phone.

That’s because the new battery is a lot thicker than the original one, and practically doubles Hero’s girth. My previously slim Hero now looks like it’s about to give birth. Oddly enough I found the new fatter Hero feels somewhat more comfortable in hand than the original slim one. It doesn’t feel more comfortable in a trouser pocket, however.

According to the instructions, I was supposed to first charge the battery in the phone for 12 hours… so I did. I know, me following instructions!? It’s a crazy world. Furthermore, the instructions also say that after that first charging I should use the phone until the battery is running very low, then recharge. By repeating this procedure a few times I should have a longer-lasting battery, I suppose. To my surprise, it took the battery almost five days to run down to 15% which is when Hero starts making a fuss about recharging. The phone was on 24 hours a day and saw lots of heavy use, including 12+ hours of talking and plenty of browsing the internet via HSDPA. The original battery wouldn’t have lasted a day in similar conditions. Despite adding weight and volume to the Hero, I have to say I’m very pleased with the new battery and how it has transformed the way I use my Hero.

PlayStation 3:n uusi, aiempaa pienikokoisempi ja vähemmän virtaa kuluttava malli saapuu kauppoihin syyskuun ensimmäisellä viikolla. Sain pelikonsolin näpelöitäväkseni muutamia päiviä aikaisemmin. Tässä alustavia mietteitä parin illan testailun jälkeen.

Kävin tänään noutamassa postista Elisa Viihde -paketin. Se sisältää 24/1mbps ADSL2-yhteyden, ADSL2-modeemin ja DVB-T/C+IPTV-digiboksin. Minulla oli ennestään Elisan ADSL2-yhteys, joka toimi parhaimmillaan 16 megabitin nopeudella. Kun tilaamani Elisa Viihde -yhteys kytkettiin toimimaan, pimeni modeemi täysin. Elisan tekninen tuki kertoi, että Linksys AM200 kuuluu modeemeihin, jotka eivät toimi Elisan ADSL-yhteyden Viihde-profiilin kanssa (yllätys!). Ratkaisu? Profiilin muutto IPTV:ksi ja yhteysnopeuden pudottaminen 8 megabittiin. (Päivitetty 1.9.09)

I purchased a Flip Ultra HD recently. First impressions were favourable: it’s extremely easy to use and the image quality beats Creative Vado HD hands down. Initial bliss turned sour rather quickly when I tried to charge the included batterypack. The bastich simply wouldn’t start charging, no matter what piece of equipment I connected it to. Monitor’s USB hub? Nope. Sennheiser Bluetooth hands-free USB charger? Nope. An external HDD enclosure with four powered USB connectors? No chance in hell.

Some googling turned up a string of comments at Hawkee.com. User ‘e-user001′ had received some instructions from Flip about how to solve the issue:

1) remove the battery pack from the camcorder
2) connect the camcorder to a powered USB port on your computer
3) when the “Connected” indicator comes on, insert the battery pack into the camcorder
4) safe eject your camcorder from your computer
5) reconnect your camcorder to your computer
6) the battery pack should now begin to charge within the camcorder

To clarify, at step 4 you’re supposed to physically detach the Ultra HD from your computer, then plug it in again at step 5.

I followed the instructions and Ultra HD is now happily recharging its batterypack from MSI Wind U100 notebook’s USB connector. Regardless, I’d rather see Ultra HD being recharged without a computer, so I asked Flip about its compatibility with all my external USB chargers. I’ll let you know, if they ever reply.

Lots of cool gear came in today. Philips BDP9100 Blu-ray player is supposed to be able to change the placement of subtitles on the screen, so I just had to ask Philips for a review unit.

I got sick and tired of all my old, slow-as-molasses USB flash drives. Turned out you can’t really find fast USB Flash drives in Finnish stores so I placed an order for a bunch of supposedly-fast USB memory sticks with a Swedish company. The shipment arrived today and I decided to benchmark the lot. (updated 6.8.09)

A few weeks back I took the plunge and placed a pre-order for a new Google Android based smartphone, HTC Hero. Mind you, it wasn’t an easy decision. Although I fall fatally in love with pretty much any new piece of gadgetry, my earlier encounters with HTC smartphones haven’t been exactly satisfying. In fact, I’d been burned pretty badly by HTC Diamond which turned out to be a rather expensive piece of crap. No, make that a complete piece of crap, barely worthy of stopping a door or weighing down a fishing line.

I purchased a Dell 3007WFP 30-inch monitor in December 2006. It exhibited some odd behaviour right from the start, but it wasn’t annoying enough for me to complain to Dell. A year ago I noticed that the display had acquired a number of dark vertical stripes. I first noticed them when trying to clean them out of a photograph with Photoshop. It actually took me a moment to realize that the stripes were not in the photo itself.

Back in March I finally decided that enough is enough and contacted Dell about the stripes. They asked for photo proof of the stripes. I took a couple of quick snaps and noticed that while I could see the stripes, the camera caught only a faint shadow of them. It took some experimenting to find out that a grey background brought the stripes up well enough for the camera. Thanks to a heavy workload it took me several months to get back to Dell with a photo. Once I did, I got an immediate reply: since the monitor is still under the three-year on-site warranty it will be replaced by another unit.

I got the reply yesterday. Early this morning the doorbell rang and a courier handed me a new monitor. I had to take it out of the box right away and place the old monitor in the box. I hadn’t slept more than a few hours and was feeling very groggy, so the operation must’ve looked like something from a Three Stooges movie. Aaanyway, when I woke from a refreshing two-hour nap, I noticed that I had not been given the same monitor. Nope, this was a newer model, a 3007WFP-HC.

According to Dell’s website this model features “TrueColor”, whatever that is. I guess “HC” in the model name means High Contrast. All I know is that the image looks very different indeed compared to the old monitor. Colors are way more saturated and practically leap off the screen. For someone who works with still and video images, and who’s measured and calibrated a number of video projectors, the image looks very oversaturated and bright. I need to take a colorimeter to this unit to see what it really can do. But first, breakfast!

After six hours of back-breaking labour last night, I’m finally running a new PC built specially for the work I do. It’s got a Core i7 CPU, Vista 64-bit SP2, six gigs of RAM and a 5.1 channel home theater speaker system by Genelec. I also replaced my previous keyboard with a new Microsoft Natural Wireless Ergonomic 7000. It connects to the PC via 2.4 GHz dongle which is currently residing in one of the USB ports at the back of the PC.

As you can guess by the subject, this keyboard is slowly driving me insane. Firstly, there’s no indicator for F Lock. This means I can’t tell whether pressing F2 results in UNDO or RENAME. Imagine moving a bunch of files from directory A to directory B. You then want to rename directory B, so you select the directory and press F2. Whoosh! The files are back in directory A. It’s enough to make a thick vein on my temple pulsate rather alarmingly.

But that’s nothing compared to the most infuriating ‘feature’ I’ve ever come across wrt keyboards. For some totally unknown reason, the keyboard quite simply stops working for 10-30 seconds. This happens totally at random. And there’s no way to ‘wake’ the keyboard up. In other words, suddenly the keyboard no longer functions and there’s nothing I can do about it.

While the keyboard was frozen, I opened the Microsoft Keyboard control panel to check if the problem was caused by poor batteries. Nope, the batteries are fine. What about the wireless signal strength then? It’s ‘High’, with full five out of five bars.

Googling for solutions was of no help. I found a few other users who complained about having the same issue but nobody had a solution. Microsoft’s Support pages offered a solution: move the 2.4 GHz dongle closer to the keyboard and/or make sure there’s nothing metallic between the dongle and keyboard. Now, why would I need to do that? Their own control panel tells me there’s nothing wrong with the signal strength.

Oddly enough, the problem has not occurred while I was typing this post. Perhaps the issue went away on its own? Yeah, right…

A wee update: installing Microsoft’s latest Keyboard software solved the F Lock issue. Pressing the F Lock key shows a tiny info balloon on screen, reporting whether F Lock is on or off. Freezing keyboard issue disappeared almost completely when I borrowed a USB extension cord with a tabletop cradle from Belkin’s WiFi dongle kit. The keyboard dongle now resides 20 centimeters from the keyboard and freezes occur maybe once a week, if that. In other words, my wireless keyboard is now using wireless transmission for the distance of 20 centimeters, and for the rest of the way the signal travels in a wire. How’s that for wireless?

Took delivery of Leadtek’s WinFast PxVC1100 MPEG-2/H.264 transcoding card last week (thanks, Dacco!) but have been way too busy to install it… until a few moments ago. I had a bunch of problems trying to install a Canopus Firecoder Blu transcoding card (equivalent to PxVC1100, but 2.5x more expensive) into my new video editing PC as the card refused to work on a GigaByte motherboard. More accurately, the card refuses to work in any other slot except PCI-E 1x — which on the GigaByte mobo is blocked by a tall-ish heatsink. In the end the only solution was to re-purpose another PC and build it as the new video editing PC. Its Abit mobo had no problems with Firecoder Blu once the card was installed in a PCI-E 1x slot.

Leadtek’s card has the same CPU (a Toshiba SpursEngine, based on the Cell CPU) but the card’s design differs slightly from Canopus’ effort: Leadtek’s card needs additional power fed in via a 4-pin floppy drive connector to power a cooling fan which is missing from Canopus’ card. The PC I decided to install the card into had another GigaByte motherboard, but with two PCI-E 1x slots. For shits and giggles, I first attempted to install the card in a PCI-E 8x slot. No way, no how. Mobo wouldn’t even see the card. Yanked the card out and placed it in the 1x slot, and hey presto, mobo found it and Windows started whining about drivers. Next step: install drivers, Pegasys TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress and TMPGEnc SpursEngine plug-in.

Update #1: First test running on a 64-bit Vista SP2. Source is 1080i 29.97fps MPEG-2 and has a length of 1h27min. TMPGEnc is outputting 1080p 29.97fps H.264 (video only, audio will be muxed in separately) and reports the process will take 61 minutes. Note that I don’t have an Nvidia graphics card in this PC so TMPGEnc is not using CUDA. It wouldn’t speed up the encoding in this case anyway as TMPGEnc uses CUDA for filters (color correction, sharpening, re-sizing etc.) only, and I didn’t use any. TMPGEnc lists deinterlacing under its Filters tab, however, so that might have profited from CUDA. It seems deinterlacing is now being done by the CPU. Quad Core utilization this very moment: 2%, 34%, 12% and 57%.

Update #2: It worked like a charm. TMPGEnc churned out an .MP4 file which I muxed with a Dolby Digital 5.1 audio from source file (demuxed with tsMuxeR) using MKVmerge 2.2.0. MPC-HC played the resulting .MKV perfectly and even lip sync was spot on. Next up: what TViX 6500 thinks of the file.