Category Archives: Hardware

Hail the New Brick

“The war is over. We lost.” So said Laura Roslin in the pilot for the new Battlestar Galactica, as she tried to convince Commander Adama that discretion was the better part of valor, or at least survival.

The same might be said of the digital audio wars. I have pretty much limitless respect for the folks at Xiphophorous; I think that Ogg Vorbis is a textbook example of how a media format should be designed and implemented for the public good. Unfortunately, a solid file format alone does not guarantee victory in the marketplace, and it’s pretty clear at this point that Apple, with the iPod and iTunes music store, has won dominance over the digital-music hill through a combination of first-class product design and spot-on execution.

Having grown increasingly frstrated with the design flaws of my trusty iHP-120, and seeing that at least one artist I care about is now releasing iTunes exclusives, I decided that the time had come to take the plunge. So I followed my friend Greg’s lead and picked up the current top-of-the-line, 60-gigabyte, color-display iPod.

My initial impression: “Wow, this thing is everything it’s cracked up to be.”

To elaborate a bit: the device’s superficial appearance is minimalist and elegant, but that’s the least of it. Clean, refined design goes all the way to the core of the thing, from the intuitive controls to the user interface — and that doesn’t even begin to touch upon its seamless integration with iTunes.

Pros:

  • It powers up instantly. (Failure to do so was one of my biggest gripes about the iHP-120, which seemed to spend half a minute or so spinning up.)
  • Music is organized intelligently and intuitively. (The iHP-120 hewed strictly to the organization of underlying filesystem.)
  • The iPod doesn’t suffer amnesia every time it talks to the mothership, but remembers exactly where it was and what it was doing before it was plugged into a host computer. (The iHP-120 would revert to the same song after being detached.)
  • The scrollwheel — more a scrollpad, really, since it uses a solid-state touch-sensitive surface — is the way every portable player should implement its interface. (Yes, I’m aware that Apple probably has the thing patented out the wazoo. That does, unfortunately, not change the facts. The iHP-120’s stubby little joystick got maddening after a while.)
  • Apple’s designers devised the dock connector on the bottom of the iPod to handle everything: power, data, and a copy of the analog audio signal. Once upon a time I might have dinged them for using a proprietary connector instead of a series of standard ones, but that was before I grew tired of plugging multiple cables into different parts of the iHP-120 on a daily basis.
  • The iPod is able to sense when something is plugged into, or unplugged from, the headphone jack. It starts up in the former instance, and pauses in the latter. (This almost seems like frippery until you consider that I ran the battery on the iHP-120 down more than once by unplugging it and then forgetting to stop it.)

Cons:

  • iTunes, on Windows at least, seems to have some kind of seizure when you first plug the iPod into the USB port. It spends a few seconds thinking about something to the exclusion of all user input before proceeding with business as usual. Annoying, but tolerable.
  • iTunes appears to want its affiliation with a given iPod to be exclusive. In other words, if you’re in the habit of plugging your iPod into machine A, you should always plug it into machine A — plug it into machine B and the first thing the latter will offer to do is wipe the iPod clean of your music and playlists. This wouldn’t be so irritating if Palm hadn’t solved this problem a decade ago, but again, it’s tolerable.

    To be honest, I haven’t investigated this aggressively — since I have a laptop now, and carry it with me everywhere, I’ve just made that the sync machine and don’t mind. I could see this getting on my nerves in a serious way, though, if I wanted to keep music collections synchronized between a work and home desktop.

Looking at the above list, it would seem that all of my complaints are with iTunes, rather than the iPod itself. Even that’s not really an accurate picture, since there’s more about iTunes to like than dislike. Its mechanics for assembling and managing playlists, for example, are everything WinAmp’s aren’t, despite Nullsoft’s having a half-decade head start in which to get it at least approximately right. You just drag and drop to your heart’s content, and never see a playlist you spent days carefully tweaking obliterated because you accidentally chose to “Play” rather than “Enqueue” some random file. I’d praise iTunes’ mechanism for syncing those playlists down to the iPod, but it almost feels like there’s nothing to praise: as with the music itself, it Just Happens.

And then there’s the iTunes Music Store. I think that this one gets counted as a “Pro”, but I won’t be sure until I have a chance to see how much damage I do the bank account with music purchases over the next few months. iTMS is simultaneously the most gratifying and terrifying e-commerce experience I’ve ever had in my life. Gratifying, because the interval between thinking “I’d like that song” and actually having it in your posession is measured in terms of a single mouse click and a matter of seconds. Terrifying, because the whole thing is so unbelievably streamlined that you could very easily lose sight of the fact that you’re spending real money every time you click “Buy”.

Careful With That Coax, Eugene

In the past couple of months I’ve tracked, on two separate occasions, cable-TV signal-quality issues down to improperly-terminated coaxial connections. Both times someone seems to have decided that the end of the center conductor should be flush with the end of the surrounding screw-on collar.

No.

For the record: when you strip coaxial cable, you’re supposed to expose one-quarter inch — sixteen sixty-fourths for the mathematically disinclined amongst you — of center conductor. The collar of the RG-6 Quad compression-fit F-connector I happen to have at hand is, according to my caliper, eleven sixty-fourths of an inch deep. The center conductor is supposed to protrude. Don’t trim it flush unless snow on your television screen and irksome connectivity problems with your cable modem are your idea of an afternoon’s entertainment.

Amateurs.

Hate Sink: Epilogue

It turns out that the Notorious K.R.I.D. had a work-supplied, Pentium-4-based Dell system with a noisy, rattling heat-sink fan that was slowly driving him nuts.

Blame for this rests solely and squarely with Dell: their standard practice since time immemorial has been to equip their machines with a large, semi-passive CPU heatsink, place an exhaust fan on the back of the machine, and connect the two with a plastic shroud. In theory, this is a better approach than the standard one involving a fan blowing air onto the heat sink: Dell’s approach draws air over the heat sink and then ejects it from the machine, rather than running the risk of simply recycling the same ever-hotter air. It would be a better approach in practice, too, if Dell would only find some way of turning the shroud into something other than a bullhorn to amplify the fan’s roar.

So we set about removing the Dell heat sink, and replacing it with the infamous PIPE101. This process was surprisingly complicated, and involved a number of unexpected discoveries.

  1. The thermal tape which Dell uses as an interface between the CPU and heatsink is surprisingly sticky. Sticky enough, at least, to pull the CPU right out of the locked ZIF socket. I didn’t know that was possible. Miraculously, none of the pins were bent.
  2. Dell, in keeping with its tradition of reinventing perfectly good wheels whenever possible, used a non-standard retaining bracket for the heatsink. Bastards.
  3. Mercifully, they didn’t have the inclination or the opportunity to deviate from the standard spacing for the heatsink-bracket retention holes. Consequently there was hope that if we could track down a spare Socket 478 heatsink-retention bracket, we’d be in business. Thanks to the ever-helpful folks at BlueBonePC, we obtained one.
  4. This was when we discovered that while the spacing on the holes is standard, the placement of certain capacitors near the CPU is not; a standard heatsink-retention bracket will not fit without modification. Dirk promptly supplied the neecessary modification by clipping out part of our bracket, in a way that didn’t seem to compromise its function. (Bastards!)
  5. The rest of the installation went relatively smoothly. The PIPE101 fit into the available space with room to spare, and Thermaltake’s approach to Socket 478 retention proved far less squirrelly than their take on Socket 939. Of course, it was only after I’d installed heatsink and fan that I realized I’d forgotten the backing plate on the other side of the motherboard, but never mind. I was even able to remove the heatsink without simultaneously extracting the CPU this time.

We then attached an exhaust fan to the back of the case through means so crude you really don’t want to know about them — I have only one word to say on the matter: “wingnuts” — reconnected the machine, and fired it up. Miraculously, it booted despite the astounding amounts of abuse and vendor-unapproved handling to which we had subjected it.

At last report, it is running strong, but silent. Dirk is happy, and so am I, to have found a suitable home for the heatsink at last.

(I’m also happy in no small measure because Dirk reciprocated by expertly tuning up my bike, from out-of-true wheel to balky front derailleur to slow leak in front tire. He also replaced my despised toe-clip pedals with a pair of Speedplay Frogs which he sold to me at friend prices, and with which I have rapidly fallen in love. Better than just do all these things for me and present a fait accompli at the end, he let me observe every step, so that I have half a chance of doing for myself in future.)

Netgear to the Rescue

The Netgear WG602 access point is a much happier piece of hardware than its accursed D-Link counterpart. It doesn’t want to reboot whenever you do… well, anything, its DHCP client implementation actually appears to work, and its built-in web-based UI is a model of elegance and simplicity.

It may, in fact, constitute one of the very few legitimate uses of HTML frames I’ve seen. Ever. The left frame chooses the configuration topic, the center frame allows you to set options, and the right frame displays help appropriate to the current context, so you don’t even have to make any additional clicks to find out just what the options you’re facing off against actually mean. I am pleased and impressed.

(Of course, I haven’t actually tried attaching any wireless clients through the thing yet, but trifles like that can wait for the time being. Also, for maximum perversity, I have acquired a Linksys high-gain antenna and antenna mount, just to add vendor mix-and-match to the equation.)

The Great 802.11 Swindle

I have long harbored the suspicion that WiFi is a kind of mass hallucination rooted in collective embarassment. Fundamental security issues — which are grave, and many — aside, no one wants to be the first to admit that this stuff often doesn’t work worth a damn, and doesn’t come close to delivering the advertised throughput even when it does connect with some approximation of reliability. The fear of being mocked for technical incompetence by one’s companions in suffering is simply too great.

Recent experiences have done more to reinforce my opinion than to change it. Thinking that it was time to move at least partway up the technology curve, I decided to acquire an 802.11g-capable access point. Having been reasonably pleased with D-Link’s DGL-4100 router, I picked up the company’s DWL-2100AP access point, along with a matching omnidirectional antenna.

To say that I am not impressed would be a galloping understatement. I didn’t necessarily expect the product to end world hunger, but for the price, I expected it to at least be fundamentally usable. No dice.

For starters, every single configuration change requires that you reboot the device. Change the SSID? Reboot. Alter encryption settings? Reboot. Switch from a static to a dynamically-assigned IP address? Reboot. Every reboot requires that you and your browser twiddle your thumbs for 20 seconds while the AP regains its ability to act as a web server.

It wouldn’t be so bad if you could batch up the changes and effect them all at once, but you can’t. Maybe you’re supposed to use the included SNMP-based access-point management software if you want advanced functionality like that, but then, really, what was the point of even bothering with a web-based configuration interface in the first place? As it is, the thing makes the Windows update and installation proceess look like the very model of simplicity and elegance, and that’s saying something.

In the end, I could live with that, since I expect to configure it once and then forget about it. I could also live with the prevalence of engrish in the UI, for much the same reason. Remember my casual allusion to dynamically-assigned IP addresses above? I should clarify: you can request that the access point act as a DHCP client, provided you don’t mind its subsequently not working at all. Out of the box, the device presumes its IP address to be 192.168.0.50; switch it to DHCP mode, and it will stop listening on that address — or any other.

Watch your DHCP host’s logs, and you will see the access point requesting and receiving a lease. And requesting and receiving a lease. And requesting and receiving a lease… and so on, ad infinitum. Even though it’s assigned the same IP address every time, it’s completely unresponsive when contacted on that address. Installing the latest-available firmware (v. 2.0, at the time of this writing) does nothing to solve the problem.

So I’m taking it back. If it were a matter of just one flaw with an otherwise-impeccable design, I’d try contacting D-Link technical support and working through the issue. But this is clearly a product that is substandard in a number of significant ways, and was shipped anyway. Those responsible should hang their heads in shame. For $100, I expect and demand better. We’ll see if Netgear can do a better job of winning and keeping my loyalty.

Ouch

Kids, the flanges on ATX power-connector sockets are surprisingly sharp. If you’re going to pull them while replacing the connector, either keep your fingers clear, or wear gloves, mmmmmKay?

Hate Sink

A few moons ago, I acquired a Thermaltake PIPE101 heat sink, a sexy little skived-copper-fin-and-heat-pipe affair. Well, okay, sexy, but not exactly “little”. It has mounting holes for a 92-mm fan, which makes it a mite larger than the typical heatsink.

This was originally a selling point, as I am a student of the big-slow-fan school of quiet cooling, but it turns out that the motherboard of the Athlon XP machine I was planning to put it into places the processor socket near the very upper edge of the motherboard, where it practically abuts the power supply. The PIPE101 won’t fit there. Oops.

So I put it aside, thinking that since it could also be used as a Socket 939 heatsink, I’d have occasion to use it whenever I got around to building an Athlon 64 machine, something I knew I’d do eventually.

Or maybe not. Because, in order to do triple duty as a Socket A/Socket 478/Socket 939 heat sink, the PIPE101 eschews most of the benefits of the AMD-designed retention bracket in favor of its own screw-in metallic clip. This clip has two possible orientations, and it’s hard to tell from the indistinct pictures in Thermaltake’s documentation which one you’re supposed to use, but in a sense it doesn’t matter: they both would have required exerting an amount of pressure upon the whole assembly that, frankly, terrified me.

Screw that, I decided. I am not jepoardizing my $350 processor-plus-motherboard investment just to save my pride and a $30 heat sink. I wound up using the AMD heat sink instead; said sink seems reasonable, is designed to clip into the AMD-designed retention bracket, and uses an elegant lever-arm mechanism to ensure adequate tension without dangerously heroic effort.

Memo to self:

  • Think long and hard before buying anything from Thermaltake ever again. Thermalright and Arctic Cooling both make nice gear whose installation requirements seem considerably saner.
  • Try to buy a heat sink that is designed for your particular processor, rather than a jack-of-all-trades design, unless you’re sure that the latter is sufficiently well-engineered to work cleanly with your hardware.
  • Check the fit on any prospective heat sink before you spend the better part of an hour lapping it. Idiot.

Memo to would-be vendors of aftermarket coolers:

  • With Socket 478 and Socket 939, Intel and AMD both went to the trouble of designing retention brackets that could realistically support the kind of large, heavy heat sinks needed to dispose of the thermal waste their processors produced. These brackets, while differing from one another, were both created with thought and care, and, when properly used, allow the installation of heat sinks without requring excessive force or pressure.

    Use them, you wankers. The next time I open a heat-sink package and find some bullshit little stamped-sheet-metal “adapter” that I have to screw into some part of my motherboard before I can get down to business, I’m going to hurt someone. That goes double if I have to remove part of the existing mounting hardware first.

Uh, anybody want to buy a barely-used heat sink? It’s been lapped and everything, and should work very nicely on any Socket A motherboard with enough room. Act now, and I’ll even throw in a 92-mm fan for free.

Dearth of Venice

About a month ago I decided that it was time to put my Athlon XP machine out to pasture. The three-year-old motherboard and CPU offered few opportunities for reasonable upgrades, and the motherboard had suffered more than its share of indignities. (One of the memory sockets had had a few of its pins bent by a careless heatsink-removal attempt; a few of the capacitors had sprung leaks, and while Bill helped me replace those, some of the front-panel I/O headers seemed to have failed somewhere along the line.)

Ah, well, thought I, it’s time to find out what life is like in 64-bit-land anyway. So I proceeded to do a little research, decided that Socket 939 was the way to go, and ordered an Abit AV8. I chose Abit because I fell in love with the company’s highly-tweakable BIOSen long ago, and the AV8 because it’s a no-nonsense PCI design based on VIA’s KT880 Pro chipset. This machine is going to be a Linux workstation: PCI Express is clearly the wave of the future, but there’s no point in placing a workhorse on the bleeding edge.

Linux also motivates the choice of chipset: while the members of the nForce family generally outperform their VIA counterparts, nVidia tend to be highly-proprietary bastards when it comes to technical data, making Linux support patchy. Bill got badly burned by this a while back, when he tried to make an SFF nForce 2 box his home Linux machine. (Come to think of it, I wasn’t all that thrilled with the nForce 2 even under Windows. It was fast, to be sure, but it had all kinds of weird and sometimes-dangerous quirks and compatibility problems. They seem to have ironed this sort of thing out in nForce 3 and 4, but I’ll let someone else play guinea pig this time around, thank you very much.)

At any rate, the board arrived scant days after I ordered it. I was on the verge of picking up a Winchester-core Athlon 64 for it when Alex happened to lend me an issue of c’t containing a detailed description of Intel and AMD’s processor roadmaps. From it I learned that the Winchester Athlon 64 I coveted was already on the verge of being rendered obsolete by the new Venice core, which was to be released that very day.

Naturally, “released” is a many-splendored term, especially when it comes to two companies like Intel and AMD (or nVidia and ATI) engaged in a years-long struggle to club each other over the head with anything that comes to hand. In this context, “released” apparently means “we put out an announcement, and shipped a handful to hardware-review sites we like.” It’s got sweet fuck-all to do with “you can plunk down your cash and actually buy one, sucka.”

So here I’ve been for the last month, on tenterhooks, sure that if I waited just a few more days, the floodgates would open and a cornucopia of purchasable Venice-core CPUs would spill forth. The best estimate I’ve heard so far is Friday, May 6th. “Soon, baby.”

Of course, with my luck, it’ll turn out that my motherboard needs a flash upgrade before it can use a Venice CPU, and all of that waiting will have been in vain. Let’s hope not.