Author Archives: daniel

Pinnacle 310i TV tuner first impressions

I picked up a Pinnacle 310i digital/analogue TV tuner card last week. APC had listed it in its top products section, which from what I’ve seen, is usually a reasonable bet. The kids were keen to try out the video editing software (Studio QuickStart), because even though it’s a cut-down version of Pinnacle’s Studio product, they wanted a change from Windows Movie Maker.

Me? I wanted a video capture card that would work in XP. My old FlyVideo card was okay-ish under Win95 (but even then the built-in apps were a bit dodgy; the TV viewing never seemed to work properly), just about bearable under Win2K (I could do captures using the Windows Media Capture utility, but it was pretty ugly setting it up). But it doesn’t work at all under XP.

TV tuning was a bonus, since it would allow recording direct off telly without going via the VCR. The 310i appeared to fit the bill. Retail is A$199, but I found it for A$169 at Landmark Computers in Melbourne, and it’s probably a similar price elsewhere.

Installing the card appeared to be pretty straightforward. Find a spare PCI slot, bung it in, and connect the lead from the card’s Audio Out to something approximating the PC’s internal Audio In. (Okay I admit I couldn’t find anything marked Audio In, and settled for CD in instead. Given that was unoccupied, it’s got me wondering if I can normally play CDs on the box… I’m not sure I’ve ever tried.)

Grabbed the first of the two CDs: MediaManager, and ran the install. The first hurdle was that despite the software claiming the CD key was on the sleeve, it wasn’t, it was on the CD itself.

Now, I don’t splurge a lot on new IT products. Part of being a geek luddite, I suppose. But this is the first mass-market consumer product I’ve come across that is built on the Dot Net Framework (version 1.1) and… wait for it… SQL Server Express Edition. That’s a hefty overhead for any end-user PC, and I’m glad mine has enough headroom that it doesn’t take a disk space (70Mb or so) or seemingly a performance hit, though I’ll be checking if it’s now running by default the service is set to start automatically. Personally I’d stick to an Access/Jet backend for any consumer-level products I was writing. It may be outdated, but it’s super-efficient in comparison.

Fired up the software and after a couple of false starts tuning the channels (one involving cancelling radio tuning, which took ages; one at the end where it appeared to hang, and I ended up rebooting the machine) it seemed to be playing nicely. The digital (and especially the HD) signals are brilliantly clear. Adhoc recording worked okay, too. In due course I’ll try the “burn live programmes” and timed recording functionality.

Mind you, I do wish software manufacturers would stop re-inventing how Windows should look. Dealing with iTunes and its permanently grey title bar is bad enough. Pinnacle’s software goes for all sorts of wacky icons for such basic tasks as minimising and maximising the window — all breaking the user’s colour and size preferences, and probably using way more PC resources than is necessary.

Next I ran the Studio Quickstart install. That took ages — it seemed to take an awfully long time to unpack the sample sounds in particular. When it eventually finished I had a little play with it. Pretty basic stuff. Plenty of transition and sound effects. Maybe the kids will be happy with it, but I couldn’t see any huge advantages over Windows MovieMaker (though outputting something other than WMV is definitely a plus).

All the best stuff (like chroma key/bluescreen, which they’d love to be able to do) seems to be locked away and requires separate payment. I might eventually do the upgrade to the full version, but I really wanted the recording functionality first and foremost.

I’ll keep playing and if I find anything worth mentioning will update later.

2007-07-12: Followup: Pinnacle TV viewing software

Nostalgia++

Could this prune iPod’s market share with the power of Nostalgia? Commodore (yes, that Commodore) announces a portable media player. Gawd knows why it’s called “Gravel In Pocket” though. They’re also readying a home media product.

Oh, there’s speculation new iPods aren’t far away.

Meanwhile this guy has built a USB keyboard out of an old Commodore 64.

This is a fun read: Halcyon Days: Interviews with classic games programmers.

GMail drowns in spam

It seems the spammers now have the edge over GMail’s antispam algorithms. It appears to be down to spam that contains lots and lots of random text, with an image containing the actual ad. (If enough spammers generate random text for long enough, will one of them eventually send Shakespeare to somebody?)

I’m not sure how many have been arriving, but there’s certainly a large number sneaking through into my Inbox, and counting those that consequently get thrown (by me) there, the Spam Folder now contains over 6500 spam, going back about a month (which is how long Gmail holds them before auto-purging).

That makes over 200 per day, which includes those directed at my old email accounts that now get directed to Gmail. Perhaps 20 of those are arriving in the Inbox. Of course, I’d rather they get through to the Inbox than any false positives go to the spam folder.

It’s probably not helped by Google Groups refusing to obfuscate the From address when posting onto Usenet. I don’t know how many addresses still get harvested off Usenet, since most users know full-well to munge their addresses, but I bet it’s quite a few.

Warning!

Am I the only one that continually gets a warning about newer format of PDF files, even though every time it comes up I tell it “Do not show this message again” ?

Acrobat warning

I know I’m a version behind on Acrobat. Version 6 is the corporate version. I’ve never known it to matter, and I’m happy with what I’ve got. Please stop bugging me to upgrade.

Windows Vista startup sound

There’s a lot of fuss about this idea of Microsoft’s to have a non-customisable, non-removable Windows Vista startup sound. That is, real startup, as the logon screen appears.

I reckon that’s one of the stupidest ideas they’ve had in a long time. At least nobody had to buy Microsoft Bob. At least you could (eventually) turn off Clippy. Not that anybody has to upgrade to Vista either, but you can bet it’ll be very difficult to get anything else on a new PC by this time next year, and not all of us want to migrate to Mac or Linux.

As Ed Bott says, there are lots of reasons you might not want an unstoppable sound when starting up the computer. Sometimes you just want the computer to be silent (there’s a reason some people disable sounds in web browsers) and you may not be able to get to the volume control/mute quick enough to shut it up. In fact, some speakers don’t have volume knobs; it’s all done within Windows, after you logon.

How many times in the past have you heard someone setting up Windows and it blaring out the startup sound during the first boot? Imagine that on every boot, and not adjustable. Bleuch.

If they go ahead with this plan, it’ll be just another reason for me to hold back and avoid upgrading… at least until someone works out a hack for it.

Are you my mummy? (Hugo award winners)

Awarded a few hours ago: 2006 Hugo Award winners.

Very pleased to see one of the greatest 90 minutes of television I watched last year, the Doctor Who story “The Empty Child” / “The Doctor Dances” got a geurnsey for best dramatic presentation: short form.

PS. Monday morning. Paul Cornell on the shock of Doctor Who beating Battlestar Gallactica for a Hugo.

PPS. Thursday. Video of the award ceremony:

Outlook sigs out of sync

Using Outlook, but your signatures are going a bit funny? Turns out it keeps multiple copies of them, in RTF, HTML and TXT format, and sometimes they get out of sync. They’re in Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures — if you check what’s there and delete any old ones, you should be okay after that. (Thanks Dave)

The importance of accessibility

Raymond Chen on why accessibility is not just for disabled people. It’s also of huge benefit to automation, for testing and integration purposes (including such diverse uses as screen scraping and speech recognition).

You bet. It’s the lack of consideration for this kind of thing that gives me my pathological hatred for web sites developed entirely in Flash, or some other mutant horror of leading-edge technologies. Too often you’ll find some whiz-bang heavy commercial ad-merchant has somehow got in control of the site design for some company that should know better, and rendered the whole site unusable…

  • with the keyboard
  • by the blind
  • let alone the blind using keyboards
  • by anybody without IE6
  • or who has a popup blocker
  • or likes to use the web in silence
  • or is trying to get around the fact that the site has no RSS or web services or any other hooks, and is trying to screen-scrape/parse the HTML

Of course I can’t stop these idiots putting pages up. And they take no notice of anything anybody says about them. But in most cases I don’t have to do business with them.

One of the side-effects of sticking to accessibility and restraint in the technologies you use is that the designs tend to be more future-proof. While some web sites are breaking under Firefox, I reckon a lot more will break under IE7 when it gets pushed out to millions of XP users.

Freebie PDF creation

I gave PDF Creator a go last week. It’s pretty good for a freebie, quite easy to use, and has some configuration and so on.

Trying it with Word documents it did seem to have problems with some fonts/styles though (generally for users other than me looking at the PDFs), so it’s worth being wary if you rely on accurate PDF-rendition. In my case, the (alas not free) Acrobat works better.

Ultimately I suspect for “industrial-strength” PDF-creation it’s best to stick to the genuine-but-expensive Acrobat Standard or Pro. The cheaper (or free) alternatives are pretty good, but don’t quite seem to cut it when the going gets tough.

Mind you if you’re not prepared to pay for Acrobat (AU$400+ for standard… pah, their time will come) I don’t see a compelling reason to get a cheaper one when PDF Creator is free.

15 years of the web

To celebrate 15 years of the web, The Observer highlights fifteen web sites that have changed the world (via Clay).

Not sure about Easyjet, given it’s UK-only, though I suppose along with sites that are now not particularly significant, but were mould-breaking at the time (such as Salon) they have been important trailblazers, with media and travel being two industries revolutionised (or at least turned upside-down and inside-out) by the Net. Ask any travel agent.

Meanwhile Time has what they claim are the 50 coolest web sites.

All this stuff, obviously, is in the eye of the beholder. And the more I think about it, the more I think such lists are pretty pointless. With hundreds of millions, if not billions of people online now, we all have our own priorities for what we want out of the Net, our own places to go. To try and narrow things down to a few dozen “coolest” is, dare I say it, lazy journalism.