Human Humax

To err is human so the saying goes, however considering the 'HU' prefix of Humax implies 'human' i should have expected issues with my new freeview hard disk recorder, the Humax 9200T. I was a little surprised to have problems, even given the prefix, as Humax have an excellent reputation in this market sector.



I upgraded my receiver from a (£39) phillips set top box which had no issues apart from the odd hardware lock but since this was a monthly problem it was not a major pain. My signal strength for Freeview is not great in Upminster, however the phillips product had no issues with sound/vision or picking up channels.....The humax however suffers badly from pops,clicks and glitches with sound and vision on most channels, the twin tuner setup in the Humax must be slightly less sensitive than the phillips device. Thus i can't say the Humax is a bad product, its just my bad signal that is the issue. In fact the Humax device itself is a joy to use with nicely thought out functions and a logical series of steps for every function on the remote.



I would love to upgrade my aerial but the building lease prevents me from having my own antenna since i am in block of flats, the shared aerial is obviously the issue but the one issue i can't solve easily. Thus 8 out of 10 for the Humax device but Zero for my signal.



Link to Humax Site for 9200T

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sky is the limit

Its been a while since i posted, its been very busy in my worklife and i have been burning the candle at both ends lately, however the project i was heading has now finished, with the right ending thank god. Either way i thought i would comment on a couple of activities i have undertaken in my ongoing friends and family support.

Sky television recently launched a broadband service (based on the services easynet provided formerly (i think, as sky purchased easynet somewhile back)), the service includes a wireless package which i have installed twice now, once at my parents and once at my uncle's.

The package contains a nice netgear DG series router with pre installed wireless network name (SSID) of SKYXXXX where XXXX is an assigned number by sky, the wireless network being protected by pre configured WPA-PSK which is Wireless protected access pre shared key, which is lowest form of the WPA network encryption available (which is explained nice here at wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPA-PSK)

Both the installs worked well from the sky side but users need to be aware that before connecting your new or existing wireless card to the sky network (the password/key is provided on the underneath of the router and on a handy wallet card)that you should download and inastll the LATEST drivers from the cards manufacturers website (Difficult if this is your new connection or your PC does not have an ethernet port). The resaon is the drivers that are supplied on the CD with mosts cards can cause problems with WPA access, my fathers PC once connected to the netgear router simply rebooted, with the new drivers (from belkin) everything works very well.

Some things i would comment on regarding sky's wireless broadband
# Is it a Good idea having the access codes to wireless WPA network on the bottom of the router?

# Is it a good idea locking down access to the router by the user (yes from a corporate helpdesk perspective i would think)

# For users who have the sky TV box plugged into the telephone system, this can cause disruptions to service every 5 mins when the TV box 'calls home'.

# the speed seemed very good, but the reliability may in question as my father and uncle both have to power cycle the router once a week.

# good support at this website - http://www.skyuser.co.uk

Comments welcome....

Spool Dual

My friends and family support duties were again called on today. An old friends of mine Microsoft Windows 2000 professional operating system was behaving very strangely. The PC itelf was an Pentium 3 Dell optiplex 400 GXi with 256meg of ram, this previously had zipped along very well and was protected from viruses by AVG free edition but only had an anti spyware scanning utility from Adaware.

On investigation i found a rather nasty virus (see below on trend micro's site)

http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/virusencyclo/default5.asp?VName=WORM_AGOBOT.ZH&VSect=T

The virus/trojan had backdoor capabilities and could be remote controlled from an IRC backend - NASTY. You can read how the virus operates above, its a real humdinger. I manged to remove it by booting into safe mode, running sysinternals 'autoruns' and disbabling the registry entry under 'image hijack', i then deleted the file it had associated with 'spooles32.exe'. I then installed fresh copies of AVG anti virus free edition (home use pc) and the very cool 'ewido' scanner. This last stage was removing the spyware elements for 'findthewebsitesyouneed.com' browser hijack. The whole project took a few hours, of in my view wasted time. I am trying to convince my pal to either switch to Linux or at least upgraede to XP to use the Windows definder protection, either way its at least another £80 that will need to be spent on securing a 'professional' operating system - (Sick)

Glimmer of Gentoo

Ok, so i had been playing around with linux for a few years, however it had been a long time since i reverted to base. I had just changed my test pc (AMD64 CPU 3200+, 512meg Ram, 40 Gb HDU, Nvidia FX5200) to run Fedora Core 5, The OS was nice and pretty, it was easy to use and configure and i felt RC5 was basically like playing with Microsoft XP (Like SuSE 10.1 OSS), i thought... TOO BORING.

I trashed the install and and decided to try and get 'geeky', i switched to gentoo, the install was CLI based you had to perform every install task yourself. However i had complete freedom to choose the software profile and get to compile the kernel and software myself (although compiling via the gentoo emerge tool is not really manually compilation), to be frank it was a challenge that i enjoyed.

I had never actually installed, for example GRUB, manually, normally i just install SuSE or Redhat and gleefully click my mouse or move the focus in an NCURSEs gui to get the GRUB software automagically installed.

I now have a fluxbox window manager with a manually configured Xorg X windows setup, everything configured with some CLI tools and the faithfull nano text editor.

I am now a happier person, the install task involved a real sense of learning and re learning aspects of Linux, by installing the 'gentoo' way, its great way of getting back to basics and i would say to anyone starting in Linux to take this route as if you can live with Gentoo, other distros will be easier to understand as you have a behind the scenes view with your gentoo experience.

A good way of thinking about this is if linux was a comedy experience, then Gentoo is a bill hicks video rather than SuSE/Redhat being a box set of friends episodes - a dose of reality!

Protect your Kids from Net Nasties

I was asked by some friends to help them with a problem relating to the internet. I had previously setup their home for wireless networking, allowing shared internet access for 3 computers via a nice Buffalo access point and an ADSL connection from the ISP Eclipse. The home network was locked down by both encryption and MAC addressing filtering which kept their network private from casual hackers.

Their problem lies in the fact that having multiple accesses to an internet connection allows their young children of 7 & 5 to have their own PC, running Windows XP and Internet explorer. Already their child had searched for 'crazy frog' (the ringtone cartoon character) on google and had been presented with a picture of a naked Frenchman thru one of the links!

Both their kids wanted to research homework, their own interests and of course games and toys, while not being victim to unpleasant content. Could I help?

Although you can set levels in Google to limit the search content and use the content settings in Internet explorer, the parents wanted something that provided rock solid content control that they could administer and have a log of what the children had searched for or tried to access.

I found them a great solution at www.surfsafe.co.uk . The guys at surfsafe keep a ‘black list’ of unsuitable content and thus have a database of all ‘net nasties’.

To use the service you sign up via the website (£3 a month) and download and install the ‘surfsafe’ software. To setup access levels you login to the ‘surfsafe’ web site, select each Windows XP account and setup the access level based on a system similar to rating cinematic films IE U/PG/18. Also, the user, via the website can set individual users access permissions based on categories of content, so for example your child could access the category ‘Search Engines’ but not have access to sexual content they found in a search from the site. It is all very simple to configure and designed for a non technical person.

In practice, the surfsafe software automatically loads and displays an icon in the system tray when a user logs into the computer. The user can browse the net as per usual, however when unsuitable content is requested thru the browser a ‘blocked’ message is displayed, then an entry is written to the online log so the ‘parent’ knows that ‘little jimmy’ tried to access a net nasty….

Surfsafe works very well and as a package is very good value, a hidden benefit is that it seems to block adverts and is a valuable tool in avoiding spyware as most ‘net nasty’ content is riddled with such software. The user can granulise the access rights so children can get suitable access no matter what their age and adult users can still access the content they desire. It’s a cool service and at £3 a month it’s a snap for all parents.

Hope this helps!

Coral Reef

I like to point other web users towards web sites that i find that really hit the spot in terms of being excellent in delivering the service they were designed to provide. A point in case being the online betting site provided by coral. The website is easy to use and really makes placing a bet a trivial task. The site also has online poker, with a JAVA application which works on my mac (!), an online casino, virtual sports (which is like a championship manager game for cash prizes), online slots and many many other cash games. Check it out for some low cost betting fun, i must admit that i do love my trips to vegas and this site keeps me going until my (now) annual vegas blowout.

Groove on Google

I was granted access to the recently released google pages creator, as my first effort using the new service from google, I very quickly created a home page for myself http://tonycossey.googlepages.com. The browser based software was slick and extremely easy to use and produced a nice result – which can be seen on the previous url mentioned. I tried the google software on XP with IE and with Linux on firefox, the firefox browser seemed to stall when clicking around the facilities like linking pages and inserting external urls but was flawless (so far) on IE. The whole process of page creation was simplified and its use anywhere nature makes it an excellent tool. The service was whole lot more integrated and WYSIWYG than blogger.com blog editing interface that I use on a regular basis. I have not yet tried the software on the powerbook/OSX/safari combination that I am using for this post. I am not entirely happy with the content on the new home page but that is something I will sharpen up in the coming days, the new page is a handy place to link to my blogs and use in my private email signature.

8 meg

I recently upgraded my broadband connection over ADSL to 8 meg, it was of those upgrades that does have an immediate impact on your way of working. My previous connection speed was 2 meg and to be honest i did not think that i would need any greater downloading muscle. However i helped a friend out who had purchased an 'ebay' laptop computer but lacked the funds for an operating system. I started the download of the excellent open source kubuntu operating system's cd image, normally i sit back and get on with something else but was stunned at the rapid download speed. It sound a little sad but seeing the 'wget' progress bar in my Linux command shell race across the screen i was feeling a little smug that i upgraded. My ISP Nildram, now owned by PIPEX and formerly owned by Mr Mardlin (yes nildram is mardlin backwards) have always provided me with a good service, apart from once being down for 4 days in a row, but 4 days in 5 years of service is not bad. I hope this 8 meg service upgrade does not effect their good record.

If you are considering upgrading your internet broadband service, i would say if you do download large files then go for it, but you just need simple web browsing, email and IM then stick to 512k or 2meg. Serial Music & Movie downloaders will love the new ADSL2's speedy downloads but as I buy all my music and movies legally, as i think this shows respect to the creator, this multimedia factor does not really effect me. On the illegal downloading subject matter i employ the following theory "As the creator has enhanced your life in some way, you shold pay back the favour".

Powerbook Widget

I published this post via the new OSX Tiger dashboard widget for posting to blogger.com. I must say its very simple and slick, just what i needed to quickly post and keep my eye on other data data such as stock prices on my powerbook dashboard. This type of application really in my thoughts constitutes what a 'killer' application is all about, however i wont rave on about it until i have used the tool for a few weeks to evaluate its stability and full feature set.....for the time bein however i am very impressed.

wynn las vegas

I have just returned from a trip to las vegas, i stayed at the wynn hotel and importantly managed to win overall on my betting, my average bet was over $100 and i enjoyed the roulette, blackjack and poker the wynn offered. As an IT professional i was impressed by the wynn in room systems, the large LCD hidef tv was supplied with a wireless keyboard (with trackball) and provided me with internet access as i did not travel with my trusty 12inch powerbook. The in room systems allowed all sorts of things to be checked in relation to your account, select movies & music plus local TV access. I think these basic services could be improved by adding access to your betting trends as a 'marked' player and allow you to book the golf, spa or in house eateries. I was surprised that wireless access via wifi was not supplied but i guess security concerns are part of that issue. Overall i was impressed by the wynn, the casino was excellent, the golf course was truly in great condition and provided a real test, the in room facilities were top class and i won! You Can't argue with that.....

Pool Playing

As some of you out there may know i am keen UK 8 ball pool player, i am the captain of the Cue ball bakers pool team who are current champions of a local Essex league, the blog is here at http://bakerspool.blogspot.com

I would advise any player to read this book as its great for the mind game involved with pool in all variations of the game

I am off to pool practice now with a few team mates, i bet 'how' i practice tonight is different from them after reading the book.

More tools, More Joy

Check these tools out,

http://www.pricelesswarehome.org/2006/PL2006SYSTEMUTILITIES.php

if you ever have to recover a Window$ XP machine after spyware or virus activity these tools are great. Also the startup monitors are cool for trimming down the 300 icons in the windows system tray.

The tools from sysinternals are absolute tiny and full of great features, Filemon, Regmon, Process Explorer and Autoruns are recommended above, copy on to your usb / stick memory. Regmon is ideal for spotting hijacks as it displays registry activity in real time.

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities.html

Ideal for friends and family support

great tool

Just a quck blog entry, check out this great tool for XP from sysinternals, AUTORUNS, download and evaluate it for yourself, i only started using this a couple of days ago after a contact of mine put its url my way. The tool provides information and methods of altering the behaviour of startup programs in XP.

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/autoruns.html

Autostart locations displayed by Autoruns include logon entries, Explorer add-ons, Internet Explorer add-ons including Browser Helper Objects (BHOs), Appinit DLLs, image hijacks, boot execute images, Winlogon notification DLLs, Windows Services and Winsock Layered Service Providers. The interface is structured so you can switch tabs to view autostarts from different categories. Very nice utility for friends and family support after xmas :-)